Voluminous Records Rule

The Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) are a set of rules that govern the introduction of evidence in civil and criminal trials in the United States federal court system. Rule 1006 of the FRE allows parties to use summaries, charts, or calculations to prove the contents of voluminous writings, recordings, or photographs. The rule applies if the writings, recordings, or photographs are accurate, otherwise admissible, and cannot be conveniently examined in court.

The originals, or duplicates, of the writings, recordings, or photographs must be made available for examination or copying, or both, by other parties at a reasonable time and place.

The Best Evidence Rule requires a party seeking to prove the contents of a writing, recording, or photograph to produce the original (or a duplicate) or account for its nonproduction.

28 USC App Fed R Evid Rule 1006: Summaries - U.S. Code U.S. Code (.gov) states:

The contents of voluminous writings, recordings, or photographs which cannot conveniently be examined in court may be presented in the form of a chart, summary, or calculation. The originals, or duplicates, shall be made available for examination or copying, or both, by other parties at reasonable time and place.

Big companies will refer to this as a statistical analysis which evolves from a compilation of gathered data. This can sometimes be called into question. For example, data for several thousand people....”How many did you ask?”, answer “Twenty”.... “You’ll have to do better than that.” In other words, the study wasn’t in depth enough.