Legal Question in Civil Litigation in California

Without knowing the exact language of the interrogatory, none of us can say whether the question asked is too vague to understand or not. If the "incident" is a spouse cheating, the incident may continue for a long time. The issue is whether the question as a whole is too vague for you to know what is really being asked about.

All the boxes checked need an answer, even if it is "irrelveant", "not applicable", etc. It does not matter what the subject matter is based upon but what the question asks for.

It scares me sometimes when attorneys who have no idea what they are talking about answer questions. For Mr. Shers to say he doesn't know the exact language of the Judicial Council Form Interrogatories pretty clearly says he is not a litigator and should not be answering discovery questions. The answer to your question is that the Form Interrogatories are deemed objection proof. The Judicial Council cannot propound standard interrogatories that judges can then find objectionable. That would just be silly. Both the nature of the form interrogatories and the Code of Civil Procedure require you to make a good faith effort to give the interrogatories a reasonable interpretation under the facts and nature of the case and then answer them. Objecting to the Form Interrogatories is per se bad faith litigation tactics.

While this is not the appropriate place for attorneys to do battle against each other,which wi ll amuse non-attorneys, since he has decided to attack me personally, and is only a little right, I need to respond. Mr. McCormick is correct that I made a Homeric nod in forgetting that the question dealt with form interrogatories and assuming there were no improper additions. But he must have has a very bad breakfast; someone handling "dispute resolutions" should take a more temperate attitude. Part of my error is from doing too much litigation and seeing how judges and attorneys actually handle interrogatories, whether form or special.

Objections to form interrogatories can in fact be made on the basis of a lack of relevance, immateriality, exceeding the number of allowed interrogatories, serving discovery after a discovery cut off date, the same question having been asked at the person's deposition or in an earlier set of interrogatories etc. I have had judges not only refuse to sanction attorneys for objecting to relevant form interrogatories, but also to not order them to answer because "I could get the information in some other way." It also is not uncommon for attorneys to add a cover page to the form interrogatories supplying their own definitions; while that is improper, one often does not know how a judge will decide a discovery motion and it wastes a client's money to force it to that point when a simple objection and offer to supply inform to a proper question will be given.

While it is foolish to create a form that has legal defects and can be objected to, no where is it stated that the Judicial Council is vested with the power of perfection. Committees often produce poor compromises. Please see the below from the web site Cal Biz Lit, stating the form questions can be objected to and two have been ruled as faulty

Objections to Form Interrogatories

Just a few hours after posting my white paper on written discovery, I encountered this post at Storm's Employment Law, criticizing the abuse of form interrogatories and raising the issue whether these interrogatories -- approved by the California Judicial Council -- can be objected to. Actually, it seems quite clear that they can be objected to just like any other inappropriate interrogatories. The Court of Appeal held in Nacht & Lewis Architects, Inc. v. Superior Court (1996) 47 Cal.App.4th 214 that Form Interrogatories 12.2 and 12.3 (asking for names of persons from whom a party has taken statements) violate the attorney client privilege and work product doctrine

Please also see Khorrami.com/pdf/articles/7.09-DeArmes, which lists many of the objections that can be made, some of which clearly apply to form interrogatories.

Mr. Shers has written to me asking me to retract my statements about his answer. He explains he was responding too quickly and wasn't thinking what he was saying when he said he didn't know what the Form Interrogatories say. He claims to be a highly experienced litigator, and I have no reason to doubt him or his explaination of his faux pas. So I apologize for calling into question his qualifications to answer the question. It is still my opinion, however, that he is essentially dead wrong. First off, the case he cites is old and on top of that it has recently been expressly rejected. See, Coito v. Superior Court (2010) 182 Cal.App.4th 758. Second, the case was a ruling on privilege, not the form of the question, and only found one form interrogatory, 12.2, to be objectionable. Nacht & Lewis Architects, Inc. v. Superior Court (1996) 47 Cal.App.4th 214 Furthermore, unlike the Coito case which was a fully briefed case, Nacht & Lewis was decided as a peremptory "Palma" writ, meaning the court of appeal decided it only based on the papers of the party filing the appeal, without receiving full briefing of the case. Id. at 218; Palma v. U.S. Industrial Fasteners, Inc. (1984) 36 Cal.3d 171. There is no case that has ever found the actual form of the questions, including the definitions, objectionable. In fact the Cal Biz Lit blogger Mr. Shers relies on, if you follow his links to his white paper, expressly agrees that "There may be some privilege objections to some of these, but there aren't any format objections available." See, http://www.calbizlit.com/00148733.pdf. Now with all that said, I do have to agree that my statement that the Form Interrogatories are ENTIRELY objection proof was overly broad. Certainly in some circumstances objections would be well taken. Asking the introductory questions for individuals of a corporation, or the contract questions in a case in which no contract is alleged, would be clear examples of objectionable use of the Form Interrogatories. But those are objections to misusing them, not to the Form Interrogtories themselves, and I stand by my statement that Mr. Shers is wrong as applied to your question. The Form Interrogatories, including the definitions, are not subject to valid objection absent patent misuse of the questions, and you open yourself up to sanctions if you object rather than answer to the best of your ability and understanding of the questions and the "incident."