Guerrilla Discovery

Battle-Tested Discovery Tactics and Weapons

Most litigation and settlement outcomes are determined in quarrelsome discovery fights. Coercion and confrontation are usually necessary to obtain evidence on the hotly-contested issues.

To help you win more of these important discovery skirmishes, Ashley Lipson’s Guerrilla Discovery offers dozens of clever strategies, novel arguments, direct answers, cautionary instructions, helpful timelines, tactically-annotated rules, and over one hundred innovative forms that will help you:

• Capture evidence establishing your claims and defenses
• Secure admissions
• Settle issues and disputes
• Impeach the enemy and its witnesses
• Uncover what the enemy is hiding
• Learn what the enemy has on you

How to handle defiant deponents and uncooperative attorneys with innovative discovery tactics and weapons. Just a few tips from the book include:

Initial Steps

• Getting the truth out of your own client can be difficult. I have found a trick that always works. After your client has told you his side of the story, look him in the eye and say, ‘I believe everything you told me. But in order to be ready for the enemy, I need you to tell me something else. When that #!$?&! comes into court, what…?’ The truth is sure to follow this question.”
• “Is It Discoverable?” annotated checklist. Here are fast, direct, and detailed answers to the most common discovery questions. Includes “Six Degrees of Discoverability” quick-reference chart.

Requests for Admissions

• “Countless times practitioners waltz into court, dumb and happy because they have under their arms papers labeled ‘business records,’ as if those papers were self-authenticating and self-admitting. They are not! This blissful ignorance, however, is counterbalanced by attorneys on the other side who, upon hearing the magic words ‘business records,’ lay down and assume that there are no defenses to admissibility. Both positions are incorrect.”
• 23 requests for admission that are specifically designed to solve document admissibility problems ignored by discovery rules and universally omitted by forms books and treatises.

Interrogatories

• “A well-drafted set of interrogatories should never receive fast answers. On the contrary, you know you have done your job when the enemy is forced to duck, weave, squirm and refuse. Take the greatest pride in questions that simply cannot be answered by the enemy.” Dozens of artfully-crafted, precisely-focused, and complete sets of interrogatories are provided. They establish elements, identify and locate evidence, attack pleadings, and assail experts.
• How to mix boilerplate and specific facts to create effective objections, with checklist of objections.

Depositions

• Tricks for catching liars, showing bias, not accepting evasive answers (including “I don’t remember”), establishing a range for quantitative information, and generally handling difficult deponents.
• How to counter verbal and nonverbal coaching, coaching off the record, and obnoxious objections.

Shields

• Here is the dream responsive pleading … a Motion for Protective Order that contains every possible challenge to every type of discovery request.
• Before responding, review these 12 grounds for objecting to discovery requests. Then check the lists of objections specific to each discovery device.
• 16 objections to physical examinations.

You receive complete and targeted sets of strategically-annotated discovery documents, complete with responses and shields for each weapon: requests for admissions, interrogatories, deposition checklists, notices for production, and notices for inspection.

This book and Digital Access are designed to help you efficiently and with less aggravation get more from your discovery efforts:

• Firmly establish your allegations
• Learn of additional counts or causes of action
• Discover and weaken the enemy’s defenses
• Quickly eliminate fictitious and boilerplate defenses
• Obtain concessions and admissions
• Coerce settlement

Use Ashley Lipson’s Guerrilla Discovery to strike and parry quickly and painfully during your next discovery confrontation.

REVISION 18 HIGHLIGHTS

Guerrilla Discovery is the most complete and most comprehensive
book on the subject of Discovery ever written — All in a single volume.

In addition to being packed with countless forms, pleadings, cases (over 2,000 annotations), arguments, sample demands and letters, lists, strategies, and counter-strategies, the following are Unique to Guerrilla Discovery:

• DETAILS for every discovery device (With Rules, Samples, Forms, Cases, Arguments):
  Requests for Admissions
  Interrogatories
  Depositions
  Notices For Production and Inspection
  Subpoenas
  Foreign Pleadings
• Annotated Checklist of EVERY Discovery Defense and Objection ever used
• GUIDE for Avoiding Dirty Tricks (Attorneys are too often victimized, unknowingly)
• An ASSEMBLY of all Official Judicially Approved interrogatories (Expert’s questions)
• What to say, and what not to say at depositions and motions
• Guide to Deposition Cross-examination
• A step-by-step roadmap for noticing, taking, and defending depositions
• Official eDiscovery court-approved protocols, and conventions
• Authoritative and Unique division of Work Product issues into precise degrees
• Extensive tactics, rules, decisions, statutes, tips, samples, checklists, and protocols
• Electronically Stored Information (ESI) resources, sources, and guides
• Coverage of predictive coding and technology-assisted review (TAR)
• Key Rules uniquely and thoroughly Annotated
• Special Glossary for electronic and digital discovery
• Special Chapter on Discovery Enforcement

AND MORE!

ABBREVIATED TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1. Fundamental Overview
CHAPTER 2. Is It Discoverable?
CHAPTER 3. Electronic, Digital and Other Media
CHAPTER 4. Weapon Selection and Attack
CHAPTER 5. Requests for Admissions
CHAPTER 6. Interrogatories
CHAPTER 7. Notices for Production
CHAPTER 8. Requests for Inspection
CHAPTER 9. Physical and Mental Examinations
CHAPTER 10. Depositions
CHAPTER 11. Subpoena Power
CHAPTER 12. Defending and Responding in General
CHAPTER 13. Defending Discovery’s Limits
CHAPTER 14. Using The Work Product Doctrine
CHAPTER 15. Using Traditional Privileges
CHAPTER 16. Exposing Burdensome and Abusive Tactics
CHAPTER 17. Enforcement
INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ashley S. Lipson has been a practicing attorney and litigator for over 30 years. He is currently a lecturer, software designer and law professor. He has taught at The Detroit College of Law, Michigan State University, Pepperdine Law School and currently at The University of La Verne, School of Law.

He is probably best known as the creator and writer of the Objection! game series (the first computer games to be certified for mandatory continuing legal education) and as author of the books Documentary Evidence (Matthew Bender), Demonstrative Evidence (Matthew Bender), Law Office Automation (Prentice-Hall), and Is It Admissible? (James). He has developed the Lawyers’ Comprehensive Computer Document System and published 60 articles.

In addition to two undergraduate degrees in Computer Science (As.D.’s), Mr. Lipson initially received his B.A. in Telecommunications from Michigan State University. He then received his J.D. degree from St. John’s University Law School in 1970. Thereafter, Mr. Lipson earned an M.A. in Mathematics from Wayne State University and an LL.M. from that University’s law school.