Reforming civil discovery – Part 3 – how zero-based discovery can work

In yesterday’s installment, I suggested that zero-based discovery would help ameliorate a basic access to justice problem, namely, that the cost of litigation has taken our civil court system beyond the reach of all but the biggest companies and the most wealthy individuals. But small businesses and middle class people still get sued and not every claim can be brought within liability insurance coverage. So we see increasing numbers of pro se litigants in our courts. Without the means to hire their own lawyers, too many pro se litigants, even those who might have meritorious claims or defenses, wind up losing to better-funded, represented opponents.

Eliminating ‘routine’ discovery will go a long way toward reducing the costs, and the pitfalls, for these pro se litigants. It may even bring the cost of representation back within the means of many litigants.

Having trouble visualizing a world without automatic discovery?

Routine discovery illustrated?

With zero-based discovery, the court would not merely inquire whether the parties have propounded interrogatories, the court would have to be persuaded that interrogatories are necessary to help this case be postured for settlement or trial and then have to approve the specific interrogatories to be propounded.

One immediate benefit would be the immediate disappearance of those six and seven page “definitions and instructions” sections that some attorneys like to lard onto interrogatories. No responsible court would ever approve a set of interrogatories with these. First of all, no one can possibly furnish answers to interrogatories that fully comply with these ‘instructions’: In the real world, the singular does not include the plural (or vice versa) and “and” never means “or” (usually couched, in the byzantine, prolix gibberish of the typical ‘instructions’ section, in terms of the conjunctive including the disjunctive... and vice versa).

Think about that for a minute. Under these kinds of impossible instructions, “two or three” might refer to an indeterminate, but small, number of something... or it might mean “five.” That’s simply absurd.

“Form” interrogatories would also vanish, unmourned, into the past. Let’s consider an example: In a garden variety rear-ender case, do we really need to know “the name and address of any physician, ophthalmologist, optician or other health care professional who performed any eye examination of” the defendant “within the last five years and the dates of each such examination?” Do we really need the defendant to disclose every doctor’s visit in the past 10 years and the reasons therefor? A court applying zero-based discovery should not ordinarily approve interrogatories like these in this sort of case despite their ‘approved’ pedigree.

With zero-based discovery, the attorneys for both side would have to persuade the trial court at the initial case management conference that they need certain interrogatories answered in order to either complete settlement evaluation or prepare the case for trial. A judge might agree that some of the old ‘form’ interrogatories might be useful in this regard – but probably not all of them in any particular case.

On the other hand, in a red-light, open intersection case, or where the defendant driver plows into a building, injuring persons within, interrogatories about the defendant’s prior health might be very important... and a court might be expected to permit these kinds of interrogatories. The important lesson is that discovery requests must be tailored to the issues in the case.

One other tremendous advantage of having direct judicial involvement in discovery from the outset of a case is that disputes about requests being too broad or too burdensome should be ‘nipped in the bud.’

In describing what zero-based discovery might look like, we started by talking about written discovery.

But there is no good reason to always wait for the conclusion of written discovery before taking depositions.

Consider an open intersection accident where each party is absolutely certain that the other ran the red light. If there were two eyewitnesses, why wait until after the plaintiff is forced to reveal that she had her tonsils out at age four? Why not start with the depositions of the two eyewitnesses? Both sides can reasonably reevaluate their settlement positions after just these two depositions are taken (the settlement value varying, of course, according to which party is identified by the eyewitnesses as being at fault). If the witnesses split, perhaps a trial is inevitable – but, then, future discovery can be framed with the necessity of trial in mind.

On the other hand, a trial court might conclude that depositions aren’t really necessary in a given case. Returning to the example of the garden-variety rear-ender case: To prepare such a case for trial, does the plaintiff’s attorney really need to know—in advance—whether the defendant claims to have hit the brakes five seconds or 10 seconds before impact? Conversely, does the defense really need to give a plaintiff the opportunity to rehearse his or her trial testimony?

Juries sometimes do strange things. When an anomalous result obtains, and the party or insurer starts looking through the pre-trial record, no attorney wants to be called upon to explain an order in which certain written discovery or depositions were ‘waived.’ Zero-based discovery will not eliminate runaway juries. But where the court has had ultimate authority about what discovery to permit and what to refuse from the very outset of the case, no one party can be blamed for ‘waiving’ anything.

Zero-based discovery will not mean zero-compliance discovery: Where a court permits certain interrogatories to be propounded, or certain documents to be requested, or certain depositions to be taken, the expectation will be that there will be “full disclosure.” But, when there is a dispute over the sufficiency of a response, the court will not have to guess what was expected; the court will have been party to the creation of the expectation.

Zero-based discovery would not mean an end to all discovery. Nor would it end Monday Morning Quarterbacking by disappointed clients or insurers. It would, however, bring an end to discovery being conducted without a valid reason or goal (and spending one’s opponent into submission would never qualify). With the parties having to justify any desired discovery and the court being involved in the process right from the start, and the natural antipathy of court and conscientious counsel toward discovery, the burdens—and costs—of discovery should be drastically reduced. Zero-based discovery is a concept that should find adherents from ITLA to the Judicial Hellhole folks. The IJA, however, may be a tougher sell....

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For the fourth and final part of this series, click here.