Courts Are Starting To Apply And Interpret FRCP Amendments On e-Discovery

The time for Congress to act on the proposed amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure relating to e-discovery has come and gone, and those amendments are now in effect as of December 1, 2015.

Prior to the effective date, a litany of questions were raised about how Courts would begin to interpret the amendments. Courts are now applying the new rules, and in Carr v. State Farm Mutual Auto. Ins. Co., No. 3:15-cv-1026-M, 2015 WL 9010920 (N.D. Tex., Dec. 7, 2015), Magistrate Judge David L. Horan addressed two of those questions.

The first issue relates to whether (and to what extent) the amendments apply to cases filed before the December 1st effective date. In Carr, the action was filed in April 2015, and the court entered a scheduling order in July, which called for a discovery deadline of December 18th and a trial date in April 2016. The defendant filed a motion on November 14, 2015, which among other things, sought to strike plaintiff's objections to the pertinent discovery requests and to compel the production of documents and ESI.

After citing the applicable Rules as they existed before December 1st, the court also cited...