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Posted by ekjadmin on September 14, 2010
For many years the Civil Rules Committee has been concerned with the increased expansion and cost of discovery and the impact of this on our civil justice system. Rule 1 states that the rules “shall be liberally construed to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action.” The discovery rules may have contributed to “just” results in the sense that they provide parties of sufficient means with the ability to discover all facts relevant to the litigation, but modern, expansive discovery has had a decidedly negative impact on the “speedy” and “inexpensive” resolution of civil disputes. Current civil discovery practice fosters one of the goals of Rule 1 at the expense of the other two.
Discovery has become the focus and the most expensive part of modern litigation. Discovery is viewed also as a primary contributor to delay.
The committee has spent the last three years studying these problems and drafting a new set of discovery rules designed to achieve all three goals of Rule 1. The changes are fundamental and will require a change of mind-set by judges, lawyers, and litigants.
Specifically, the change in mind-set is away from a system in which discovery is the predominant aspect of litigation (in which every party has a right or obligation to incur or bear the cost of almost any request for discovery) and toward a system in which each request for discovery must be justified by its proponent, and the focus is on moving quickly and efficiently to the disposition of the merits of the case (through settlement, summary judgment, or trial).
Kudos to the Rules Committee for drafting rules that simultaneously address (and we hope resolve) discovery abuses and simplify discovery, so that the result is “the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action.” Now let’s work on reducing the superfluous content and number of Utah Rules of Judicial Administration too.
The legislature should take a page from the Committee’s notebook and pare down the Utah Code with similar objectives, so that statutes subserve the public interest, not make criminals of us all through sheer volume and minutiae.
To view the entire Committee report, click here: www.utcourts.gov/committees/civproc/Proposed_Rules_Governing_Discovery_Summary.pdf
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