Joe Falcone has published an article in Financier Worldwide addressing proposed amendments to the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which govern civil cases in US federal court. If adopted, these amendments should narrow significantly the historically broad scope of discovery in federal court and reduce the spectre of court-imposed sanctions for a party’s unintentional loss of electronic information (including e-mails) sought during the discovery process.
As examined in the article, by expressly requiring that civil discovery be proportional to what’s at stake in the action and by making discovery sanctions (which have been draconian in some US cases) a last-resort option only where a party intentionally destroys information for litigation advantage, the proposed changes would help restore a modicum of reasonableness to the US discovery process, and help return discovery in federal cases to its proper place in litigation: a means for investigating the underlying merits of a case and not the focus of the case itself.
Continue reading here for further information and analysis regarding these important potential changes to the US federal court rules.
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