Civil discovery rules revamped.

Byline: Thomas Franz

In 2016, the Michigan Supreme Court encouraged the State Bar of Michigan to take a look at reforming civil discovery rules.

On June 19, 2019, the court issued an order, Amendment of Discovery Rules (MiLW No. 06-100548, 45 pages), detailing the many amendments that are coming to civil discovery in Michigan.

"The impetus for this is the federal rules were undergoing a series of changes and had already gone through an evolution, and the Michigan court rules had not been holistically reviewed and revised since 1985," said Daniel D. Quick, chair of the Civil Discovery Rule Review Special Committee of the State Bar of Michigan.

Background

According to an 89-page Representative Assembly proposal dated March 10, 2018, Quick's committee was formed to review Michigan Court Rules dealing with the civil discovery process to address the expense and burden of civil discovery.

Five subcommittees were later formed to address the following areas: e-discovery; expert witness discovery; scope and course of discovery; case management from the court's perspective; and domestic relations, probate, juvenile, and district court discovery.

Work began in November 2016, and over the next 10 months, the committee created an initial draft of changes to the discovery process in civil cases.

The committee approved a draft report on Sept. 25, 2017, and Quick presented the project to the Representative Assembly during a Sept. 28, 2017, meeting.

After that presentation, the committee made the report public and received feedback from nearly 50 organizations, all of which expressed varying degrees of support for the changes. The Representative Assembly noted that no organization voted against the proposal.

Key changes

Quick said that from his perspective, two of the most significant changes deal with active case management and proportional discovery.

"The messaging and the extra tools for active case management really puts the onus on the courts as well as the litigants to be thoughtful about their cases, what's at issue and what's a reasonable and efficient path to get from point A to point B. It gives the court a lot more tools to work with parties to get to that end," said Quick, a member at Dickinson Wright PLLC in Troy.

Quick added that proportionality has been designed to signal that discovery is not a free-for-all.

"It's not going to go on without some reasonable boundaries imposed upon it. The point of the court rules is to obtain just and...