The bench and the bar continue their historic battle with the ever-growing tsunami of civil discovery. In 2009, the American College of Trial Lawyers and the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System published a white paper that recommended that the notice pleading requirement of the federal court system should be abolished; instead, they recommended a return to “fact pleading” as a means to reduce discovery. In 2015, there were substantial changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to reduce the time and effort spent on discovery. The latest official efforts are two court ordered mandatory pilot projects created by the Judicial Conference of the United States which were recently put in place in the Northern District of Illinois and the District of Arizona. This column discusses the program adopted by the Northern District. I am licensed in Illinois and a certified trial counsel in the Northern District.

The mandatory initial discovery pilot project (MIDP) took effect in the Northern District on June 1, pursuant to a standing order and a discovery user's manual. Pursuant to the plan, all parties to civil litigation in the Northern District (there are some limited exemptions) must make mandatory disclosures before initiating any further discovery. These are significant changes to current federal civil procedure, which possibly could become required procedure depending upon the results of this pilot project.

The project was approved by the Judicial Conference of the United States in September 2016. The drafters of the project state the MIDP was designed, “in part as a result of the experience in states and the Canadian judicial system that have successfully required substantial mandatory disclosures.”