The Court held that Shell had complied with its disclosure obligations under the Document Management Protocol by using conjunctive keyword search strings, finding that the plaintiff had not demonstrated those searches were unreasonable despite the possibility that disjunctive searches might identify additional documents. The Court applied the Telstra v Australis Media Holdings framework and held that redaction of salary and contact details of employees other than the two relevant comparators was permissible where the redacted information was irrelevant to the pleaded case and there were legitimate privacy and confidentiality interests. The Court ordered limited further disclosure of specific documents (meeting requests/responses relating to 24 April 2012) on the basis they were relevant to a fact in issue rather than merely going to credit, but declined to amend the DMP categories more broadly due to disproportionate cost of restoring archived mailboxes.
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