Attachment F

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF FLORIDA

Case No. 20-22427-Civ-COOKE/GOODMAN

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Plaintiff,

vs.

REAL PROPERTY LOCATED 

AT 900 BISCAYNE BLVD UNIT 

#6107, MIAMI, FLORIDA 

33132,

Defendant In Rem.

/

MAGISTRATE JUDGE GOODMAN’S DISCOVERY PROCEDURES ORDER

The following discovery procedures apply to all civil cases in which discovery is 

referred to United States Magistrate Judge Jonathan Goodman and where Judge Goodman 

is presiding over a case with full consent.

OVERALL STATEMENT

The Court designed these procedures to help the Parties and the Court work together

to timely resolve discovery disputes without undue delay and unnecessary expense. The 

procedures are designed to (1) promote the timely internal resolution of discovery disputes 

by the parties themselves so that they have no need to seek judicial intervention, (2) help the 

parties obtain timely rulings to the extent they cannot on their own resolve their discovery 

disputes, (3) streamline the process of resolving discovery disputes by eliminating 

unnecessary motion practice, and (4) assist the Court by prohibiting the submission of 

motions and memoranda which are unnecessary, overly long or both.

MEET AND CONFER

Counsel must actually confer (in person or via telephone) and engage in reasonable 

compromise in a genuine effort to resolve their discovery disputes before filing a notice of a 

discovery hearing. In other words, there must be an actual conversation before a discovery 

hearing notice is filed. If counsel refuses to participate in a conversation, then the party 

seeking to a discovery hearing will so state in the required certificate of conference and 

outline the efforts made to have a conversation. 

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The Court may impose sanctions, monetary or otherwise, if it determines discovery 

is being improperly sought, is being withheld in bad faith or if a party fails to confer in good 

faith. Sending an email or telefax to opposing counsel with a demand that a discovery 

response or position be provided on the same day will rarely, if ever, be deemed a good faith 

effort to confer before filing a discovery hearing notice.

DISCOVERY CALENDAR AND NO DISCOVERY MOTIONS

No written discovery motions, including motions to compel, for protective order, or 

related motions for sanctions will be filed unless specifically authorized by the Court.1

Similarly, the parties may not submit legal memoranda concerning a discovery hearing 

unless the Undersigned specifically authorizes it. This procedure is intended to minimize the 

need for discovery motions. The Court will strike any unauthorized discovery motions and 

memoranda.

If, after conferring, the parties are unable to resolve their discovery disputes without 

Court intervention, then the Court holds a regular discovery calendar every Friday 

afternoon. The party seeking the discovery hearing will contact Chambers at (305) 523-5720 

to place the matter on the next available discovery calendar. That party will be provided 

with available dates and will then confer with opposing counsel and confirm his or her 

availability for the discovery calendar. Once opposing counsel has confirmed availability, 

the party seeking the hearing will contact Chambers again to finalize the hearing date. 

[NOTE: The longer a party waits to contact Chambers to follow through after being 

provided with available times, the more likely it is that the hearing date will no longer be 

available. Therefore, the Court encourages parties seeking discovery hearings to follow 

through on a timely basis and confirm the hearing date.].

On the same day that Chambers confirms that the matter is being placed on the 

discovery calendar, the party seeking the discovery hearing will provide notice to all relevant 

parties by filing a Notice of Hearing and serving a copy on opposing counsel through the 

Court’s electronic docketing system. The Notice of Hearing will briefly and succinctly

identify the substance of the discovery matter to be heard. (For example, “The Parties 

dispute the appropriate time frame for Plaintiff’s Interrogatory Nos. 1, 4-7, and 10” or “The 

Parties disagree about whether Defendant produced an adequate 30(b)(6) witness on the 

topics listed in the notice.”) Ordinarily, no more than 20 minutes per side will be permitted. 

The party scheduling the hearing will include in this Notice of Hearing a certificate of 

good faith that complies with Southern District of Florida Local Rule 7.1(a)(3). The 

Court will strike hearing notices which do not include a sufficient local rule certificate.

1 Nevertheless, if the parties wish to submit an agreed-upon discovery order, such as a 

standard confidentiality-type of protective order, then they will (1) file a Notice of Proposed 

Stipulated Order with the proposed order attached to the notice and (2) submit a Wordversion courtesy copy to the Undersigned’s CM/ECF mailbox 

(goodman@flsd.uscourts.gov). This Order does not prohibit that submission because there 

is not a discovery dispute; instead, there is an agreement about a discovery issue.

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The party who scheduled the discovery hearing will provide the Court a copy of all 

source materials relevant to the discovery dispute, via hand-delivery or through a document 

that is emailed to the CM/ECF mailbox (goodman@flsd.uscourts.gov) on the date that the 

Notice of Hearing is filed. (For example, if the dispute concerns interrogatories, then the 

interrogatories at issue and the responses thereto, will be provided.) Source material is the 

actual discovery at issue. Source material is not memoranda or letters to the Court which 

are, for all intents and purposes, a mini-brief. The opposing party may submit additional 

source material to the CM/ECF mailbox, as well.

Neither the Notice of Hearing nor the source materials should be used as a de facto 

strategy to submit a memorandum. For example, sending multi-page, rhetoric-filled letters 

to the Court or filing argument-riddled notices are specifically prohibited. The Court will 

strike letters, notices, and exhibits which are designed to circumvent the no motion/no 

memoranda policy. 

If one or more of the parties believe in good faith that the discovery dispute is not a 

routine, garden-variety dispute and needs specialized attention, then the parties may include 

a to-the-point, no-more-than-one-paragraph explanation in the Notice of Hearing, to flag the 

specific issues. In addition, the parties may submit a “notice of authorities,” which will list 

only the authorities, but which will not contain argument or be a disguised memorandum. 

At most, the list of authorities may contain a one-sentence, objective summary of the 

relevant holding of each case or authority. The Court will strike any non-compliant notice of 

authorities.

For those discovery disputes which are particularly complex (and there are not many 

of those) and which a party believes will require briefing, a motion for leave to file a 

discovery motion or memoranda may be filed. The motion should briefly explain the 

extraordinary need, but the actual discovery motion or memorandum should not be 

attached or filed unless the Court grants the motion seeking leave. The Court anticipates 

that the need for motions and/or memoranda will arise only rarely.

The following topics are illustrations of discovery disputes which are usually not rare 

enough to bypass the standard no-motion policy and therefore would not ordinarily justify a 

motion for leave to file a discovery motion in a specific case absent extraordinary 

circumstances: (1) whether a party may take more than 10 depositions in the absence of 

consent; (2) whether a deposition may last more than 7 hours; (3) how a seven-hour 

deposition is allocated among the parties; (4) whether a 30(b)(6) witness was prepared to 

provide binding testimony on all the topics listed in the notice; (5) whether a noticed 

deposition is an “apex” deposition, and, if so, whether it will be permitted; (6) whether a 

party needs to arrange for a treating doctor to provide an expert witness report or if the party 

needs to make other written disclosures if the physician is expected to testify about the cause 

of an injury; (7) squabbles over the location of a deposition; (8) whether an attorney 

improperly instructed a deponent to not answer certain questions; (9) whether an attorney 

was improperly coaching a deponent; (10) whether a party or attorney may pay any money 

to a deponent or trial witness other than a standard witness fee, and, if so, under what 

circumstances and in what amounts; (11) whether a party may take “early” discovery; (12) 

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whether a party exceeded the number of permissible interrogatories (and how should the 

sub-parts be counted); (13) whether an interrogatory answer is adequate or whether better 

answers are required; and (14) whether a party engaged in a strategically unfair “document 

dump” which makes it difficult for a party to know which documents are responsive to a 

request. These are all routine discovery disputes which require the submission of only the 

Notice of Hearing, source material and, at most, an argument-free list of authorities.

The Court expects all parties to engage in reasonable compromise to facilitate the 

resolution of their discovery disputes. The Court may impose sanctions, monetary or 

otherwise, if the Court determines discovery is being improperly sought or is being withheld 

in bad faith.

These procedures do not relieve parties from the requirements of any Federal Rules 

of Civil Procedure or Local Rules, except as noted above.

PRE-HEARING DISCUSSIONS

The mere fact that the Court has scheduled a discovery hearing/conference does 

not mean that the parties should no longer try to resolve the dispute. To the contrary, the 

parties are encouraged to continually pursue settlement of disputed discovery matters. If 

those efforts are successful, then counsel should contact Chambers as soon as practicable so 

that the hearing can be timely canceled. Alternatively, if the parties resolve some, but not 

all, of their issues before the hearing, then counsel will also timely contact Chambers and 

provide notice about those issues which are no longer in dispute (so that the Court and its 

staff do not unnecessarily work on matters no longer in dispute). 

EXPENSES, INCLUDING ATTORNEY’S FEES

The Court reminds the parties and counsel that Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 

37(a)(5) requires the Court to award expenses, including fees, unless an exception (such as 

the existence of a substantially justified, albeit losing, discovery position) applies to the 

discovery dispute and ruling.

NO BOILERPLATE DISCOVERY OBJECTIONS

“Vague, Overly Broad and Unduly Burdensome”

Parties will not make conclusory boilerplate objections. Such objections do not 

comply with Local Rule 26.1(e)(2)(A), which provides that, “[w]here an objection is made 

to any interrogatory or sub-part thereof or to any production request under Federal Rule of 

Civil Procedure 34, the objection will state with specificity all grounds.” Blanket, 

unsupported objections that a discovery request is “vague, overly broad, or unduly 

burdensome” are, by themselves, meaningless, and the Court will disregard such objections. 

A party objecting on these bases must explain the specific and particular ways in which a 

request is vague, overly broad, or unduly burdensome. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 33(b)(4) (the 

ground for objecting to an interrogatory “must be stated with specificity”); Josephs v. Harris 

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Corp., 677 F.2d 985, 992 (3d Cir. 1982) (“the mere statement by a party that the 

interrogatory was ‘overly broad, burdensome, oppressive and irrelevant’ is not adequate to 

voice a successful objection to an interrogatory.”). Testimony or evidence may be necessary 

to show that a particular request is in fact burdensome.

“Irrelevant or Not Reasonably Calculated to Lead to Admissible Evidence”

An objection that a discovery request is irrelevant or “not reasonably calculated to 

lead to admissible evidence” is an outdated type of objection, as that language no longer 

defines the scope of discovery under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(1). The current 

version defines the scope of discovery as being “nonprivileged matter that is relevant to any 

party’s claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case” -- and then lists several 

factors to analyze. The Court reminds the parties that the Federal Rules provide that 

information within this scope of discovery “need not be admissible in evidence” to be 

discoverable. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(1); S. D. Fla. L. R. 26.1(g)(3)(A); Oppenheimer Fund, 

Inc. v. Sanders, 437 U.S. 340, 351-52 (1978).

No Formulaic Objections

Parties should avoid reciting a formulaic objection followed by an answer to the 

request. It has become common practice for a party to object on the basis of any of the 

above reasons, and then state that “notwithstanding the above,” the party will respond to 

the discovery request, subject to or without waiving such objection. Such a boilerplate 

objection and answer preserves nothing, and constitutes only a waste of effort and the 

resources of both the parties and the Court. Further, such practice leaves the requesting 

party uncertain as to whether the responding party fully answered. Moreover, the Federal 

Rules of Civil Procedure now specifically prohibit that practice (which was deemed 

inappropriate by many judges and commentators). For example, Federal Rule of Civil 

Procedure 34(b)(2)(C) now provides that an objection to a request for documents “must 

state whether any responsive materials are being withheld on the basis of that objection.” In 

addition, it also says that “an objection to part of a request must specify the part and permit 

inspection of the rest.” Therefore, counsel should specifically state whether the responding 

party is fully answering or responding to a request and, if not, specifically identify the 

categories of information that have been withheld on an objection-by-objection basis.

Objections Based upon Privilege

Generalized objections asserting attorney-client privilege or the work product 

doctrine also do not comply with the Local Rules. S. D. Fla. L. R. 26.1(e)(2)(B) requires 

that objections based upon privilege identify the specific nature of the privilege being 

asserted, as well as identify details such as the nature and subject matter of the 

communication at issue, the sender and receiver of the communication and their 

relationship to each other. Parties must review this Local Rule carefully, and refrain from 

objections in the form of: “Objection. This information is protected by attorney/client 

and/or work product privilege.” The Local Rule also requires the preparation of a privilege 

log except for “communications between a party and its counsel after commencement of the 

action and work product material created after commencement of the action.”

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DONE AND ORDERED in Chambers, in Miami, Florida, this 24th day of

February 2021.

Copies Furnished to:

The Honorable Marcia G. Cooke

All counsel of record

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