The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that a computer generated summary of data in a computer was admissible in evidence. In U-Haul Int’l. v. Lumbermens Mut. Cas. Co., 576 F.3d 1040 (9th Cir. 2009) the defendant objected on a number of hearsay basis to a computer generated summary of data in the computer being received in evidence. The Court of Appeals affirmed the admission of the summary and held that since it was prepared and used in the regular course of business it was admissible as a business record under Federal Rule of Evidence 803(6).
Defendant also argued that the summaries were inadmissible because they violated Rule 1006. The Court said,
“Finally, Lumbermens agues that the exhibits containing the summaries were inadmissible because they violated Rule 1006. That rule allows “The contents of voluminous writings which cannot conveniently be examined in court’ to be presented in the ??form of a chart, summary, or calculation.’ Fed.R.Evid. 1006. However, the rule requires that the originals, or duplicates, be made available for examination or copying by other parties at a reasonable time or place. Id. As discussed in Section II above, the summaries themselves constituted the business records. They were the writings at issue, not summaries of other evidence. Thus, Rule 1006 does not apply.” (pp. 1045-6)