UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF FLORIDA

MIAMI DIVISION

CASE NO. 22-24023-CIV-SCOLA/GOODMAN

KENNETH C. GRIFFIN, 

Plaintiff(s),

v.

INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE, et al., 

Defendant(s).

___________________________________________/

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 

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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 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 shall so state in the required certificate of 

conference and outline the efforts made to have a conversation.

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

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

or related motions for sanctions shall 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 shall 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 

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

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

Proposed Stipulated Order with the proposed order attached to the notice and (2) submit 

a Word-version 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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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 shall 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 must be doublespaced. It shall 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 twenty (20) minutes per side will be permitted. The party scheduling the 

hearing shall 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. 

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

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

attachments that are 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, shall be 

provided.) Source material is the actual discovery at issue. Source material is not 

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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 

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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) 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 

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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 shall 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).

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RULE 30(b)(6) DEPOSITIONS

The party seeking to take the deposition shall include only a reasonable number 

of topics to be covered in a 7-hour deposition. Listing 40 or 50 (or more topics) is 

presumptively unreasonable. If the corporation or entity has any objections to the topics 

listed in the Rule 30(b)(6) notice, then its counsel shall first confer and try to resolve the 

dispute. But, if a complete resolution is not reached, then the party seeking to take the 

deposition shall notice the dispute for a hearing before the Undersigned (following the 

same procedures outlined above) and obtain a ruling on the disputed topics before the 

Rule 30(b)(6) deposition occurs.

Counsel for the corporation or entity is not required to identify the designee or 

designees before the deposition begins, but he or she is certainly free to volunteer the 

information as a courtesy.

It is permissible for a party to take the deposition of a person in his/her 

representative capacity as a corporate designee and also take a separate deposition of that 

person in his/her role as a fact witness. The attorney scheduling the depositions has the 

discretion to determine the order in which the two depositions occur. The attorney taking 

the depositions may take the fact witness deposition and the Rule 30(b)(6) deposition at 

the same time but shall clearly announce on the record when the deposition is changing 

into a different type of deposition.

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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 shall 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 shall 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 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.

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“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 

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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 

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

the action.”

DONE AND ORDERED in Chambers, in Miami, Florida, on December 19, 2022.

Copies furnished to:

All Counsel of Record

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