Civil Discovery: Lawyers’ Views of Its Effectiveness, Its Principal Problems and Abuses

Author:

Brazil Wayne D.

Abstract

This article, the second in a three-part series based on interviews of 180 civil litigators in Chicago, describes lawyers’ assessments of the health of the discovery system and their views about the relative severity of several major problems and abuses that burden the discovery process. The data present a disturbing picture of the way the discovery system functions, especially in larger cases. Big case litigators are much unhappier with the current state of affairs in discovery than are their smaller case counterparts, and apparently for good reason. Tactical jockeying, evasive and dilatory practices, and various forms of harassment play major and costly roles in a high percentage of large lawsuits. And in at least one of every two big cases the discovery system fails to distribute the relevant information to all the parties. Perhaps the most dramatic evidence of disaffection with the current state of affairs in major litigation, however, is the widespread support the lawyers expressed for more aggressive judicial involvement in the process and for more frequent, telling use of sanctions to punish its abusers.The third article in this series will report the lawyers’ reform proposals and will explore some of the implications of the data described here.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Reference137 articles.

1. The 17 subgroups whose responses were compared are listed in appendix D.

2. There is reason to suspect that the percentages reported in this paragraph understate how often clients persuade their lawyers to resist disclosure. Some attorneys intimated that admitting that their clients could pressure them into taking questionable positions would reflect badly on their professional ethics and on their capacity to control the professional dimensions of the attorney-client relationship.

3. Thirty-eight percent of the defendants' attorneys and 42 percent of the attorneys who primarily represented large corporations favored narrowing the scope of discovery, while among the plaintiffs' lawyers and the attorneys who primarily represented individuals the figures were 23 and 22 percent, respectively.

4. To identify principal client types, the interviewers asked the attorneys: “Focusing on your work in civil litigation over the past two years, has any one type of client or institution been the source of more than ten percent of your litigation work during that period?” Attorneys who answered in the affirmative then were asked: “Would you please identify the client types?” and “What percentage of your work has each client type produced?”

5. A few lawyers reported a closely related type of conduct that they probably would not classify or define as evasion. It consists of an attorney pressuring witnesses whose testimony will hurt his client to be unavailable for depositions.

Cited by 13 articles. 订阅此论文施引文献 订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献

1. Discovery, disclosure, and confidence;International Review of Law and Economics;2021-06

2. Litigation;International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences;2015

3. The Economics of Civil Procedure;SSRN Electronic Journal;2015

4. Jurisdictional Discovery in Transnational Litigation: Extraterritorial Effects of United States Federal Practice;Journal of Private International Law;2011-04

5. Detection Avoidance and Enforcement Theory: Survey and Assessment;SSRN Electronic Journal;2010

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