Here are the First Sets of Discovery Requests in the Oregon Case! Learn a little law with me!

A lot of you have expressed appreciation for (dare I even hope perhaps delighting in?) the legal education that you are picking up along the way with me. So I thought that the filing of the State of Oregon’s first discovery requests might be interesting to those of you interested in the inner workings of the law, and interesting for all of you even if you aren’t interested in how the law works because discovery gives you a view into the issues from the inside rather than just peering in like the little match girl.

Put as simply as possible, discovery is when one side gets to request of the other that they produce bits of what most of you would call ‘evidence’. And while I said “request”, it’s really more of a demand, a demand that has the force of law. If the other side has the thing for which you are asking, they have to give it up to you.

The thing is, you have to already know what sort of things you are looking for, and then you have to craft the requests in such a way that the other side can’t wriggle out of producing them by saying that “this thing doesn’t *quite* match your request, so we didn’t have to produce it.”

If you get *too* specific, you might miss the thing you’re looking for because it was outside the scope of what you requested; but if you are too general or broad the other side can actually object to the request being overbroad.

For example, let’s say you are representing the plaintiff, Patty, in a hit and run of Patty’s parked car that happened on January 5th in front of Patty’s house, and you are trying to prove that Dave, the defendant, did it.

Dave drives a red Subaru, and you found some red paint on Patty’s silver car. If your discovery request is “All times on January 5th that Dave was on Patty’s Street driving his 2010 red Subaru” it may be that the response will be “Dave did not drive his red Subaru on Patty’s street on January 5th.” If you ask “All times between January 1st and January 30th that Dave drove any car in Patty’s neighborhood” (because maybe you’re trying to establish that Dave was familiar with Patty’s street), Dave’s lawyer is likely to object that the discovery request is ‘overbroad’. But, if you ask “All times on January 5th that Dave drove any red car on Patty’s street” and “All times on January 5th that Dave’s car was driven on Patty’s street” you’ll uncover that in fact Dave was driving his friend’s red car, or perhaps that Dave’s *friend* was driving Dave’s car.

I’m considered a bit weird because I *love* drafting discovery. It’s an art that also requires experience and expertise in the law, and it was actually my *favorite* part of my litigation practice; it’s like a chess game.

There are generally two types of non-in-person discovery (a deposition is also a form of discovery, that’s in person): interrogatories, and requests for production of documents. They are both what they sound like; interrogatories (think “interrogation”) are questions that you send over to the other side, and requests for production of documents is, well, you’re asking the other side to produce these documents.

Notes from the Front members, I’m including three files for you: the State of Oregon’s first set of interrogatories, the State of Oregon’s first set of requests for production of documents, and the State of Oregon’s status report which they filed along with their discovery (as required by the Court). I am sure that you will find them very interesting, and by the time you are done reading all three you will be a lay expert in discovery. :~)

The status report is a regular report to the Court about how things are going, in this case it includes how things are going with the parties conferring with each other to establish a discovery schedule and other things related to discovery. While status reports often aren’t terribly interesting, in *this* case, well, there’s nothing uninteresting about this case! Any status report that includes “Defendants also raise substantive objections to Plaintiffs’ discovery requests to the extent they are directed to the President of the United States” is just, well, not boring. You see, the administration is trying to say that you can’t request discovery from the President of the United States because well, he’s the President of the United States. If that doesn’t get resolved between the parties I expect Judge Perry to smack that right back down.

You will see that the first several pages of both the interrogatories and the request for documents contain definitions. This is, of course, to help make sure that the requests themselves are effective by establishing a mutual understanding of what, for example, “force” means (“any physical effort or restraint used to obtain or attempt to obtain physical control of a person or their property (or effects)”).

The interrogatories take this form:

“State all facts that YOU contend establish any instance of a “rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States” in Oregon, for purposes of subsection (2) of SECTION 12406”

And requests for documents take this form:

“All DOCUMENTS that YOU contend memorialize OR describe any instance of the President being “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States” in Oregon, for purposes of subsection (2) of SECTION 12406”

Notes from the Front members, the three documents are below - have fun! ⬇️

*To protect myself I don’t share the documents I find publicly, I make them available privately to Notes from the Front members. If you’re not a member you can join at the link below ⬇️ and get instant access to these documents and all of the other documents and benefits of membership including our private chat - it’s $5 a month and it’s totally fine to join and then immediately cancel if you only want certain documents.