This is the fourth in a series of articles on the practical implications of the 2015 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. They went into effect on Dec. 1, 2015.

Despite the critical role that written discovery plays in litigation, it is remarkable for how uniformly terrible it is. In virtually every matter, discovery gets kicked off with the requesting party, fretting about missing the “smoking gun,” drafting ridiculously broad requests.

The responding party then joins the fun, fueled with outrage over the absurdity of the requests, and cobbles together “responses” that are merely a collage of boilerplate objections. Those objections are, in turn, typically followed by a statement to the effect that the responding party, subject to those objections, will produce any responsive, nonprivileged documents, if it turns out it has any, at a time that the producing party deems fit.