Judge Peck
Judge Andrew Peck is a magistrate judge in the Southern District of New York, who made a bit of a name for himself in ediscovery circles by actually understanding it. Well, it turns out computers aren’t the only thing he understands — he totally gets the 2015 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and gets suuuuuuper pissed when lawyers before him do not.
In the Magistrate’s latest report and recommendation, for a trademark infringement case Fischer v. Forrest, he went OFF on the defendants for not complying with the 2015 amendment to Rule 34, which now requires parties to object, with specification, to discovery requests. As Law.com reports:
“It is time, once again, to issue a discovery wake-up call to the bar in this district,” Peck wrote in Fischer v. Forrest, 14-cv-1307. The case is a Lanham Act trademark infringement case, in which he issued a report and recommendation on motions to dismiss in January.
Peck said that Rule 34 requires a litigator to state grounds for objections with specificity; state whether any responsive materials are being withheld on the basis of that objection; and specify the time for production—and, if it’s a rolling production, state when production will begin and end.
“Most lawyers who have not changed their ‘form file’ violate one or more (and often all three) of these changes,” he said.
Yikes. So, please, for Judge Peck’s sake, edit your form file. He notes the problem is not unique to the defendant in the instant case, “despite the clarity of the no-longer-new 2015 amendments, this court still sees too many non-compliant Rule 34 responses.” And it does not make him happy:
Here, the defendants made 17 “general objections” in their most recent Rule 34 response, leading him to say, “Let us count the ways the defendants have violated the rules.”
And don’t think you can throw in some generic blanket language to meet the standard set up in the rule:
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For example, a response to two requests stated they were “overly broad and unduly burdensome”—phrases the judge called “meaningless boilerplate.”
“Why is it burdensome? How is it overly broad?” Peck stated. “This language tells the court nothing.”
So consider yourself warned and step up your game.
This Magistrate Judge Is Fed Up With Lazy Discovery Responses [Law.com]
Kathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).