Friday, February 7, 2014
Joint Comment on the Proposed FRCP Amendments
This week, some colleagues and I submitted a joint comment opposing the recently proposed amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Our letter addresses the proposals regarding the scope of discovery as defined by Rule 26(b)(1), the reduced presumptive limits on discovery devices, and the elimination of Rule 84 and the Forms. From the introduction:
In our judgment, two key issues bear close consideration by the Committee as it considers how to proceed: (1) What problem does the Committee seek to solve? (2) On balance, how likely is it that the proposed amendments will improve the status quo? As in 1993 and 2000, the Committee is focused on addressing a perceived problem of excessive discovery costs. In supporting the current proposed amendments, the Committee recognizes that empirical data show no widespread problem, but nevertheless hopes that new across-the-board limits on discovery will lessen discovery costs in the small number of complex, contentious, high stakes cases where costs are high. The Committee is correct about the data: most critically, the Federal Judicial Center’s (“FJC”) 2009 closed-case study shows that in almost all cases discovery costs are modest and proportionate to stakes. As in 1993 and in 2000, evidence of system-wide, cost-multiplying abuse does not exist, and the proposed amendments are not designed to address the small subset of problematic cases that appear to be driving the Rule changes. We anticipate that, as with past Rule changes, untargeted amendments will fail to eliminate complaints about the small segment of high-cost litigation that elicits headlines about litigation gone wild; instead they will create unnecessary barriers to relief in meritorious cases, waste judicial resources, and drive up the cost of civil justice. The amendments are unnecessary, unwarranted, and counterproductive.*** In our view, the amendments are likely to spawn confusion and create incentives for wasteful discovery disputes. Even more troubling, by increasing costs and decreasing information flow, the proposed amendments are likely to undermine meaningful access to the courts and to impede enforcement of federal- and state-recognized substantive rights.
The comment was submitted on behalf of myself, Helen Hershkoff (NYU), Lonny Hoffman (Houston), Alexander Reinert (Cardozo), Elizabeth Schneider (Brooklyn), and David Shapiro (Harvard).
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/civpro/2014/02/joint-comment-on-the-proposed-frcp-amendments.html