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1 Thomas E. Willging, Data from Middle Ground Districts: Memorandum 1 (1998)

handle is hein.congcourts/midgdis0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Federal Judicial Center Research Division S memorandum Writer's Direct Dial Number: 202-273-4070 FAX 202- 273-4021 DATE: February 23, 1998 To: Advisory Committee on Civil Rules FROM: Thomas E. Willging SUBJECT: Data from Middle Ground Districts Two districts in the Federal Judicial Center's discovery survey have local rules that require less disclosure than does Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(a)(1). The Northern District of Alabama (centered in Birmingham) and the Central District of California (centered in Los Angeles) each modifies the federal rule by limiting document disclosure to those that support the disclosing party's claims or defenses. Experiences with disclosure in these two districts is of special interest to the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules as it attempts to draft a uniform national rule on initial disclosure and explores the middle ground between the current requirement and abolition of disclosure requirements. To address the subject, we focused on survey responses in which disclosure took place under a federal or local rule (as opposed to an individual judge's case management practices). Approximately 10% of such responses came from Northern Alabama or Central California. For many analyses, the number of cases is too small to test meaningfully for statistically significant differences between the two types of rules. For example, we did not find statistically significant differences in any of the effects attorneys reported under the two types of rules. Nevertheless, it seems useful to present the data simply to describe the attorneys' responses. As with attorneys responses to initial disclosure generally,' attorneys in the 1 See Thomas E. Wiliging, John Shapard, Donna Stienstra, and Dean Miletich, Discovery and Disclosure Practice, Problems, and Proposals for Change 26-27 (FJC 1997).

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