In the last several months, judges of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York have issued a number of rulings on discovery disputes that offer both pragmatic resolution of the dispute at hand and broader, instructive commentary on the scope of permissible discovery. These rulings make clear that Southern District judges are increasingly losing patience with discovery for discovery’s sake. Perhaps in recognition of the proposed amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure designed to reduce discovery burdens (expected to take effect in December 2015), those judges are taking to heart Rule 1′s admonition that the Federal Rules should be “construed and administered to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action and proceeding.” This column discusses several of those opinions.
Relevance
Relevance objections to discovery requests rarely get much traction, given the expansive reach of Rule 26(b)(1), which defines relevant information for purposes of discovery to include not just admissible evidence but evidence that “appears reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence.” For this reason, courts and litigants alike generally view the scope of discovery as broader than the scope of admissibility under the Federal Rules of Evidence. However, Southern District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan recently granted a protective order barring, on relevance grounds, the depositions of certain witnesses while recognizing that their testimony might be relevant “in the capacious sense” of both Federal Rule of Evidence 401 and Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(1).
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