This court order may offer some insight into the costs of litigation. Sometimes agencies are awarded costs. In this case, $9,502.12 “incurred in scanning, duplicating, collating, and Bates-stamping the administrative record, which numbered in excess of 24,000 pages.”
Well, the full ‘costs of litigation’ (“the intellectual effort involved in their production”) are probably an order of magnitude greater than these document costs for which recovery is authorized by statute. It’s still interesting since this case appeared to be a pretty ordinary timber sale lawsuit, but I don’t remember hearing about these kinds of claims around the office. I would think that a $10-$50,000 potential bill would be enough to make smaller non-profits think twice about a lawsuit, and I wonder if their attorneys typically discuss this risk with them.