Legal Question in Civil Litigation in California

Your motion will most likely be denied. It was not timely filed and served.

I disagree with Mr. Roach. The 45-day time limit for filing a motion to compel FURTHER responses does not apply when the responses are unverified. Your problem is that you needed to file a motion to compel responses, not to compel further responses.

There is no deadline to file a motion to compel responses. Unverified responses are deemed by law to be no responses. However, it would be best to refile the motion, as Mr. McCormick suggests, as a motion to compel responses rather than to compel further responses. You are correct that, under ordinary circumstances, five days are added to the 45 days to file a motion to compel if the verified responses are served by mail.

Although not required, to show good faith, you might write a meet-and-confer letter to counsel for the other party o try to resolve the issues, to show the court that you exercised every opportunity to get the verified complete discovery responses.

It would probably help if you were clear as to what the discovery items were: such as interrogatories, inspection demands, or requests for admissions. Each one is governed by different rules and motions.

If the responses contain objections, and your motion is directed to responses containing objections, it is untimely. Mr. Kippen, who I used to work with before he retired, already went down the path the other two attorneys argue, and lost. "After reconsideration, we conclude that by filing a timely but unverified response to a request for production of documents, Blue Ridge did not waive its asserted privilege objections as the objections do not require a verification in order to be preserved." (Blue Ridge Ins. Co. v. Superior Court (2nd Dist. 1988) 202 Cal.App.3d 339, 341.)

Mr. Roach is confusing the issue of whether responses are timely for the purpose of preserving objections, with the situation you are in, asking whether your motion to compel is timely. The time to file a motion to compel further responses does not start when unverified responses are served. It does not make the objections valid either. It simply means the right to object is preserved by filing unverifiable objections on time. None of which has any bearing on when you have to file YOUR motion.