Legal Definitions - abuse of discovery

In a lawsuit, discovery is the pre-trial process where each side gathers information and evidence from the other. This can involve asking written questions (interrogatories), requesting documents, or taking sworn testimony (depositions). Abuse of discovery occurs when one party misuses or excessively uses these information-gathering tools, not for legitimate purposes of finding relevant facts, but to gain an unfair advantage, harass the opposing party, cause delays, or increase legal costs.

Here are some examples of how abuse of discovery might occur:

• Example 1: Overly Broad Document Requests

  Imagine a small business suing a former employee for stealing a specific client list. During discovery, the former employee's lawyers send a request demanding every email, internal memo, and financial record from the small business for the past five years, even though the lawsuit only concerns the client list from a specific period. This is an abuse of discovery because the request is excessively broad and seeks vast amounts of information clearly irrelevant to the specific dispute, likely intended to overwhelm the small business with compliance costs and distract from the core issue.

• Example 2: Intentional Delays and Obstruction

  Consider a personal injury case where a plaintiff is seeking damages after a car accident. The defendant's legal team repeatedly cancels scheduled depositions of key witnesses at the last minute, reschedules them for inconvenient times without consulting the plaintiff's attorney, and provides incomplete or evasive answers to interrogatories, forcing the plaintiff to file multiple motions with the court to compel proper responses. This demonstrates abuse through intentional delays and obstruction, making it difficult and costly for the plaintiff to gather necessary information and prolonging the legal process.

• Example 3: Repetitive and Burdensome Questions

  In a dispute between two software companies over alleged copyright infringement of a particular feature, one company submits 300 nearly identical interrogatories to the other, asking the same questions about their product development process in slightly different phrasing. They also request the production of millions of lines of source code that are only tangentially related to the specific feature in question. This is an abuse because the repetitive questions and excessively broad document requests are designed to create an enormous burden on the opposing party, forcing them to spend excessive time and money responding, rather than genuinely seeking new information.