Until recently, the California Code of Civil Procedure provided that parties responding to inspection demands could produce documents either “as they are kept in the usual course of business” or “organized and labeled to correspond with the categories in the demand.” Given that most litigators are not predisposed toward making their opponents’ lives easier, this optionality led to a proliferation of “data dumps,” in which a responding party produces a large, undifferentiated mass of documents and leaves it to the requesting party to sort out how, if at all, a given document in the production pertains to the case.
No more. Effective January 1, 2020, the California legislature amended CCP § 2031.280 to require that all documents produced in response to an inspection demand “shall be identified with the specific request number to which the documents respond.” As the Senate Judiciary Committee explained: “This form requirement greatly benefits a requesting party, who will now be given clear guidance as to what documents are relevant to each of its specific demands.” At the same time, the Senate Judiciary Committee acknowledged the obvious cost of the new rule: “[T]his will often place a heavier burden on the responding party, who must now more clearly articulate the connections between each document, or category of documents, and the relevant demands.”
Some open questions remain. For instance, the new rule does not state whether documents that are responsive to more than one request must be “identified” as such, or whether tying each document to a single request is sufficient. The new rule also does not dictate the method of “identifying” documents. Presumably, parties producing electronic documents could tie those documents to particular requests via metadata produced as part of a load file. Alternatively, a responding party’s production letter could call out documents or document ranges by “Bates” number and state the request to which such documents relate.
One thing is clear: Litigators who fail to familiarize themselves with the amendments to CCP § 2031.280 and proactively build compliance with it into their discovery plan do so at the risk of increased meet and confer costs, additional motions to compel, and/or discovery sanctions.
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