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Guidelines And Best Practices For Implementing The 2015 Discovery Amendments Concerning Proportionality (Second Edition), Bolch Judicial Institute

Bolch Judicial Institute Publications

In November 2014, the Duke Law Judicial Studies Center, which became the Bolch Judicial Institute in 2018, held a conference on the discovery proportionality amendments with more than 70 practitioners and 15 federal judges. Drafting teams were subsequently formed, consisting of 32 practitioners, who worked for nine months on an initial draft set of GUIDELINES AND PRACTICES prepared by Judge Lee Rosenthal and Prof. Steven Gensler. The team’s work product, the GUIDELINES AND PRACTICES FOR IMPLEMENTING THE 2015 DISCOVERY AMENDMENTS TO ACHIEVE PROPORTIONALITY, was published in 99 Judicature, no. 3, Winter 2015, along with several related articles.

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Rwu First Amendment Blog: David Logan's Blog: Discovering Trump 06-22-2018, David A. Logan

Law School Blogs

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Aligning Incentives And Cost Allocation In Discovery, Jonathan R. Nash, Joanna M. Shepherd

Faculty Articles

Recent proposals to revise Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26 to incorporate cost allocation of discovery have sparked considerable controversy. Advocates for reform argue that replacing the long-standing “producer-pays” presumption with something more akin to a “requester-pays” rule would better align economic incentives and reduce litigants’ ability to wield discovery as an instrument to force settlement. Opponents argue that such a reform would limit access to justice by saddling requesters with an ex ante burden of funding the opposition’s discovery.

In this Article, we explain that either a rule requiring both parties to share the costs of discovery (“cost-sharing rule”) …

The Narrative Of Costs, The Cost Of Narrative, Alexander A. Reinert

Articles

In Judge Victor Marrero’s Article “The Cost of Rules, the Rule of Costs,” he argues that too many lawyers use too many procedural devices to cause too much inefficiency within our civil justice system. His Article helpfully asks us to focus on the role of the lawyer and law firm economics in assessing how to solve waste and abuse in civil litigation. He proposes an array of procedural changes to address these perceived problems. In this response, I argue that Judge Marrero’s assertions about costs are questionable, given relevant empirical evidence. Moreover, although I am confident that there are instances …

Neither Limited Nor Simplified: A Proposal For Reform Of Illinois Supreme Court Rule 222(B), Michael S. Smith

Michigan Law Review

A limited and simplified discovery system should broaden access to courts, resolve disputes quickly, and expedite relief to injured parties. It should not incentivize procedural gamesmanship or increase the system’s complexity. Regrettably, Illinois’s “limited and simplified” discovery system does both. The initiation procedure for the simplified system, Rule 222(b), creates procedural traps and perverse incentives for both plaintiffs and defendants, and conflicting appellate interpretations of the Rule intensify the problem. This Note examines the flaws underlying the current simplified discovery scheme and argues for reform. It examines simplified discovery schemes in other states to recommend a new system for initiating …