Legal Question in Business Law in California

The usual response to an unintelligible complaint is to file a demurrer. I've never encountered an instance where responding to a document-production demand was rendered impossible by a lack of clarity in the complaint, although some production demands border on unintelligible.

One thing you might do is call (or write) the other attorney (or unrepresented party) and ask for clarification. Whether this will work or not depends upon how civil everyone is, and other factors, but there's no rule against trying. Don't contact a represented party.

I doubt that "I'm unaware of the specific charges" would be well received by a party or a judge as a reason for failing to respond to discovery, particularly document production. I assume you were sufficiently aware of the allegations of the complaint to file and serve a responsive answer.

My further recommendation would be to over-produce documents. If you have 45 documents that are clearly responsive to a demand, 60 that might have some bearing on the issue or demand, and 112 that could possibly have some shred of relevance under the most extreme possible end of the spectrum of claims in the complaint, then furnish all 217 of them. You risk not being able to use documents at trial if you failed to produce them in response to a production demand.

Finally, consider hiring an attorney, if only to coach you on how to handle matters like this, while you keep your name on the filed and produced documents as an "in pro. per."

You should get a lawyer. If you must do this yourself, you may indeed object that you don't yet know enough about the plaintiff's case to be sure how you will defend against it. But stating the objection will not excuse you from producing evidence that you understand is responsive to the plaintiff's requests. There may be other reasons why you could withhold some of it.

Good luck.