Source: https://www.jeremywrichter.com/category/discovery-evidence/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 01:23:23+00:00

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Category Archive for "Discovery & Evidence"
Every year, changes are made to the Federal Rules of Evidence and Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. In 2017, the Supreme Court approved substantive changes to Federal Rule of Evidence 807. This year, the committee proposed and the Supreme Court adopted changes to Federal Rules of Evidence 803 and 902. These changes will go into effect on December 1, 2018.
(16) Statements in Ancient Documents. A statement in a document that is at least 20 years old, and whose authenticity is established.
You can find these Committee Notes at rulesofevidence.org.
FRE 902 is being updated to add two new categories of self-authenticating evidence.
Robin Houston sued Publix arising from an alleged slip-and-fall at a Publix Super Market in McDonough, Georgia. The alleged incident occurred on July 24, 2012, after which Houston treated with a medical doctor who sold the medical debt for Houston’s treatment to a litigation investment company, ML Healthcare. ML Healthcare purchases medical debt at a discount rate from medical providers, using a contract that allows ML Healthcare to recover out of an tort settlement or judgment the full cost of the medical care provided. At trial, Publix sought to introduce evidence of this collateral source relationship to show Houston’s doctor’s were biased in their testimony and that Houston’s claimed medical expenses were unreasonable.
Stated in its simplest terms, Georgia’s collateral source rule allows that “the receipt of benefits or mitigation of loss from sources other than the defendant will not operate to diminish plaintiff’s recovery of damages.”1)Polito v. Holland, 258 Ga. 54, 55 (1988) (A plaintiff as “the right to recover damages undiminished by collateral benefits). Evidence of collateral sources payments is inadmissible if it would be used only to show a reduction in damages.2)Id. at 56. However, evidence of collateral source payments is admissible if it serves a valid evidentiary purpose other than revealing the benefits to the jury.
In the ML Healthcare Services case, Publix sought to introduce evidence of collateral source payments to attack the credibility of the causation opinions offered by Houston’s doctors. The district court found that ML Healthcare’s business model, which included fronting medical expenses for plaintiffs to treating physicians was highly relevant and probative as to the bias of the treating doctors, as was the reasonableness of the medical expenses. As such, the district court found the collateral source evidence had the valid evidentiary purpose of impeaching the witnesses and was admissible.
According to this 11th Circuit opinion, in Alabama, any showing that the Plaintiff has received collateral source payments (whether insurance payments, workmen’s compensation benefits, or from a litigation investment firm) may constitute reversible error.3)Southern v. Plumb Tools, 696 F.2d 1321 (11th Cir. 1983). Note: My practical experience has differed, so I may need to do some additional looking into this issue. But suffice it to say that if you’re in an 11th Circuit state other than Georgia, your state law will be applied and may achieve a different result than this opinion allows.
The 11th Circuit upheld the district court’s ruling that evidence of collateral source payments was admissible for the purpose of showing potential bias of Houston’s treating physicians’ testimony. For ML Healthcare to be profitable it must subsidize plaintiffs who win their lawsuits. The arrangement creates a risk of bias on the part of medical providers who receive referrals from ML Healthcare and later testify on behalf of the patients/plaintiffs they have treated. If the doctor failed to provide causation testimony favorable to the plaintiff’s claim, ML Healthcare would find doctors who were willing to provide such testimony.
Because the collateral source evidence served a legitimate evidentiary purpose (other than to reduce damages, for which purpose the evidence would have been inadmissible), the district court did not abuse its discretion in admitting this evidence.
1. ↑ Polito v. Holland, 258 Ga. 54, 55 (1988) (A plaintiff as “the right to recover damages undiminished by collateral benefits).
2. ↑ Id. at 56.
3. ↑ Southern v. Plumb Tools, 696 F.2d 1321 (11th Cir. 1983).
I am prefacing this article by saying that I am a resident of Gardendale, Alabama. This article is not a commentary on Gardendale’s efforts to secede its schools system from Jefferson County, nor am I expressing any opinion about the rulings of either the 11th Circuit or Judge Haikala in the United State District Court for the Northern District of Alabama. My purpose here is to illustrate the long teeth of social media content and how Facebook posts can be used to show intent (fairly or not), and thereby impute motives to the actors involved in litigation. Spoiler: It can be very bad for the parties.
In the last few decades, a number of municipalities have withdrawn their school from the Jefferson County system and form independent school districts. Gardendale is the most recent such school to attempt to do so. Their efforts met with opposition, and the issue ended up in court in front of Judge Haikala of the United State District Court for the Northern District of Alabama. Judge Haikala found that Gardendale’s secession attempt was racially motivated and was impermissible (That’s the shortest possible version of her 190-page opinion), but her order incorporated a compromise that left both sides unhappy and resulted in an appeal to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The parties briefed and argued their positions before the 11th Circuit, and recently, Judge William H. Pryor wrote the opinion for the 11th Circuit denying Gardendale the opportunity to form an independent school district. In his opinion, Judge Pryor spent as sizable chunk of space supporting the court’s opinion that Gardendale’s efforts were racially motivated. Much of the content he used to support the position was from Facebook posts on a Facebook group operated by supporters of the movement.
Below is the bulk of the section of Judge Pryor’s opinion that deals with the social media issue. You can download the opinion in its entirety here.
The Gardendale secession movement started when the schools in that City were becoming racially diverse while the population of the City remained overwhelmingly white. In 1996, the student population in Gardendale was 92 percent white and 8 percent black. The current population of the City has a similar demographic makeup. As of 2010, more than 88 percent of the population was white and less than 9 percent was black. But by 2010, only one of the four public schools in Gardendale, Snow Rogers Elementary School, came close to mirroring the racial demographics of the City. In 2010, Snow Rogers Elementary was about 94 percent white and 4 percent black. The other three schools in Gardendale—Gardendale Elementary, Bragg Middle School, and Gardendale High School—were less than 80 percent white and 20 or more percent black. Gardendale Elementary was about 75 percent white and 20 percent black; Bragg Middle was about 77 percent white and 21 percent black; and Gardendale High was about 75 percent white and 23 percent black. And in later years, the schools continued to become more racially diverse in even starker contrast with the demographics of the City. Snow Rogers Elementary had a student population that was about 85 percent white and 5 percent black during the 2015–16 academic year. Gardendale Elementary was about 71 percent white and 24 percent black. Bragg Middle was about 67 percent white and 29 percent black. And Gardendale High was about 71 percent white and 27 percent black.
The racial diversity of the schools in Gardendale stems from the attendance of students who reside outside its municipal limits. Students from the predominantly black community of North Smithfield/Greenleaf Heights constitute nearly 30 percent of the black student population at Bragg Middle and more than 25 percent of the black student population at Gardendale High. Students from the unincorporated and predominantly white community of Mount Olive as well as students from the more integrated Town of Brookside and City of Graysville also attend the middle and high schools in Gardendale. Dozens of black students have taken advantage of the majority-to-minority transfer provision in the 1971 order to attend schools in Gardendale. For example, from 2009 to 2016, anywhere from 12 to 22 black students attended Gardendale High annually as transfer students. After the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, 20 U.S.C. §§ 6301 et seq., required public school boards to permit students attending schools “identified for school improvement” to transfer to schools not so identified, 20 U.S.C. § 6316 (repealed 2015), the district court also amended the 1971 order to permit some black students from less successful schools to transfer to Snow Rogers Elementary and Bragg Middle. Because of capacity issues, the district court permitted only 12 students to transfer to Bragg Middle for each of the relevant years. In sum, Gardendale schools are racially diverse institutions in an otherwise white enclave in large part because zoning and desegregation transfer opportunities permit other Jefferson County students to attend the schools.
Against this backdrop, four individuals, Tim Bagwell, Chris Lucas, David Salters, and Chris Segroves, launched a campaign to create a municipal school system for Gardendale. Segroves later became the president of the Gardendale Board. Lucas became a member of the Board. And Bagwell and Salters served on an advisory board.
As part of their campaign, Bagwell, Lucas, and Salters created and maintained a Facebook page titled “Gardendale City Schools.” The page was publicly accessible, but the secession leaders served as page administrators with the ability to approve new members, delete posts, and change the privacy settings.
1) Will kids in North Gardendale (who may currently be zoned for county schools in Morris) be zoned for a city school system? Yes. All kids within the municipal boundaries of Gardendale would go to schools within the new system.
2) Would Gardendale be required to bring in minorities from outside of the municipal boundaries to achieve some sort of quota? No. The school system is for residents of Gardendale (whatever those boundaries end up being and whatever that racial make-up is). The idea is that it might include an expansion to include an annexation of certain parts of Mount Olive.
Indeed, the secession leaders and others regularly discussed the status of Mount Olive, though practical obstacles related to the local fire district ultimately thwarted their intended plans.
You and I may not think that it is particularly fair to accept an out-of-district area not subject to our control or taxation as a price to pay to gain approval for separation, and we would be within reason to feel that way. The extent to which fair has anything to do with it depends on how you weigh your priorities in deciding whether it is too bitter a pill to swallow or if the ultimate treatment goal, i.e. separation, is worth it.
It’s impossible to know whether the decisions of Judge Haikala or the 11th Circuit would have differed had these indicting statements not been made on Facebook. Maybe there would have been enough other evidence for them to find that the secession attempt was racially motivated. But for Judge Pryor to have spent that much time incorporating the social media content into his opinion, you can know for a certainty that it weighed on the 11th Circuit’s ruling.
This is but one case showing how social media content can derail litigation and cause massive wreckage to a case. Associate’s Mind has recently written about how social media affected a 9th Circuit decision.
Be mindful of what you put online. I’ve heard several folks say, “Never put anything in writing that you wouldn’t want a lawyer to hand you as an exhibit while you’re on a witness stand.” This seems like a good rule of thumb for anyone to consider before publishing social media content.
Here are a couple other topics where I’ve written about litigation and social media content: The Discoverability of Social Media Content in Civil Litigation and Responding to Social Media Discovery Objections in Alabama.
When you’re defending a case, I expect you are likely issuing discovery requests to the plaintiff (hopefully, immediately after filing an answer). I expect there is also a high probability those discovery requests include social media discovery requests. If your experience has been anything like mine, those social media discovery requests draw objections more often than not. Here are some things to consider: Are your Interrogatories and Requests for Production narrowly tailored enough to be proper? Was the objection appropriate or just a shot in the dark assuming that you won’t notice or be bothered to make a fuss over it? Do you know how to respond to the objections?
Through no fault of his own, a man was involved in a car wreck. To be compensated for his injuries and damages, he sued my client. He claimed as a result of the accident he was no longer able to ride or race motorcycles. We issued discovery requests asking him to identify his social media accounts. He complied. We then scoured one of his social media accounts for anything that we could use to discredit his testimony. We found plenty of photographs and comments that supported our contention that his claims may not be completely genuine.
We brought out some of this at his deposition, and he attempted to explain what we were seeing. Then when he made the same claims in front of the jury, we used even more of the photographs and his own words left in comments sections to impeach his testimony. We achieved a result for our client that likely wouldn’t have been possible without the social media discovery we had obtained.
Rule 33 Interrogatory: Describe any and all social media accounts or sites that you have an account with or access to and state your username on said accounts, including but not limited to any information on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, MySpace, Instagram, Pinterest, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn or any other blogs or other websites that you currently use or have used in the five years prior to the subject incident, including on the date of the collision. NOTE: You are hereby instructed not to delete, erase, or otherwise destroy the content contained on any social media page(s), blog, or other website that contains information, posts, photographs, or other content produced, posted, or otherwise authored by you, throughout the course of this litigation.
Rule 34 Request for Production: Produce any and all archived information, posts, tweets, photographs, and/or any other material authored or posted by you on any social media or websites used or frequented by you and pertaining to either the subject incident or any damages or injuries that you allege have arisen from the subject incident.
Response: Plaintiff objects to this request based on the fact that it is overly broad, calls for information irrelevant immaterial to this accident, is invasive of the plaintiff’s privacy, the retrieval or compilation of which would be unduly burdensome on the plaintiff and is otherwise not reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence.
Social media content is subject to discovery under the applicable rules of civil procedure and is not privileged or protected by privacy right, and Alabama courts have properly admitted it into evidence, including relevant statements and photographs from social media accounts. See e.g., Morgan v. Morgan, 183 So.3d 945 (Ala.Civ.App. 2014) (wherein the court admitted evidence, included statements and photographs, from social media site); Davis v. Blackstock, 160 So.3d 310 (Ala.Civ.App. 2014) (wherein photographs from a social media page were admitted into evidence and testimony elicited regarding the contents of the social media page); Grimes v. Saban, 173 So.3d 919 (Ala. 2014) (wherein the contents of the parties’ Facebook pages were admitted and testimony elicited regarding the contents of the social media pages).
As the requesting party, you must be mindful that under the Alabama Rules of Civil Procedure the requested information must be reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence (which is different from the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure adopted in 12/2016). Where the plaintiff has alleged injuries resulting from the subject accident, you can reasonably expect in his deposition, the plaintiff will testify regarding the subject incident and his claimed injuries. Any statements made by the plaintiff, whether on social media or in any other discoverable form, that bear on the subject accident or his injuries or damages, or abilities either prior or subsequent to the accident are discoverable under the Alabama Rules of Civil Procedure, whether or not the evidence is admissible.
Social media posts that are not privatized or otherwise protected are functionally no different than any other statement made by a party in a public place, and no less discoverable. Anything posted by a plaintiff on any social media accounts is a “statement” as defined by Alabama Rule of Evidence 801(a). Under Alabama Rule of Evidence 801(d)(2) such statements, if offered against a plaintiff, are not hearsay and are admissible as evidence.
… you can attend my cleverly titled webinar, “Social Media and E-Discovery” with Alabama Law Weekly on February 21.
I was recently involved in a car wreck case in which plaintiff’s counsel firmly believed that my client was using her phone at the time of the accident. The only problem was … the facts did support his assertion. There wasn’t even one tiny, little fact that he could present to the jury to support his belief. But never one to let facts get in the way of a theory, he had a plan. A plan that involved him impeaching the defendant by asking her irrelevant questions and then using immaterial evidence to impeach her with.
Q: But there are times you do text while driving, right?
A: It’s very rare, if I ever do it. And I have a voice-to-text app that I can use so I don’t have to look away from the road. I mean, I have a two-year-old little boy, you know. Plus it’s illegal.
Q: But when you’re driving, do you sometimes use the phone whether it’s for videos or pictures or browsing the internet or any of those things?
Q: Is that something you never do?
A: I don’t ever do that if I’m driving.
Q: Okay. Well, videos — do you record videos while driving?
A: No. My phone is hooked up to the car.
And that was it. At that point, the defendant was like one of those insects who’s been snared in a web and doesn’t know it yet. The spidery lawyer sprung on her with a video he had pulled from her Facebook page for just this occasion. The video showed the defendant recording her son who was singing in the back seat of the car. She was in the driver’s seat in her church parking lot, navigating the stop-and-go traffic of one of Birmingham’s mega-churches and recording her toddler while stopped.
There it is. She said she never records video while driving. But he had video of her doing so. A couple of important things here: (1) there was still no evidence that she was using her phone in any way at the time of the accident, and (2) the impeachment video was taken nine months after the accident. He had his impeachment evidence but it was irrelevant to anything that happened on the roadway the day of the accident.
There are only certain ways that impeachment evidence can be used, and Alabama Rules of Evidence 607 and 608 set these out.
truthfulness has been attacked by opinion or reputation evidence or otherwise.
witness being cross-examined has testified.
Impeaching a witness is allowable when the proffered evidence relates to a material issue. But when a question calls for “patently immaterial and irrelevant testimony,” impeachment is improper, as “a witness may not be impeached by showing that she has made contradictory statements about immaterial matters.
Even if the plaintiff had intended to use the video footage not to impeach the defendant directly, but rather to show evidence of her character, it was still not a permissible use. Alabama Rule of Evidence 404 precludes evidence of a person’s character or a character trait to prove conformity therewith on a particular occasion. The video couldn’t be used to suggest to the jury that she had used her phone on one occasion, so she must also have been using when the accident happened.
In short, the video didn’t have any permissible method of being admitted and seen by the jury. So if you’re laying a trap to ensnare some unwitting witness, be sure that the evidence you’re using and the testimony you’re obtaining are material to case. Otherwise, you’ll just have wasted all that cleverness and plotting.
 Hobbs v. State, 669 So.2d 1030, 1032 (Ala.Crim.App. 1995) (quoting Tarver v. State, 500 So.2d 1232, 1243 (Ala.Crim.App. 1986)).
 Pope & Quint, Inc. v. Davis, 485 So. 2d 1134, 1137 (Ala. 1986).
 King v. State, 171 So. 254, 256 (Ala. 1936); Smith v. State, 73 So. 2d 916, 919 (1954) (holding, “The effect of the question was to impeach [the witness] on an immaterial matter, which is not allowable.”).
 See Ala. R. Evid. 404(a).
Ever year on December 1, adopted changes that govern various rules of the profession go into effect. In 2015, the Advisory Committee on Rules of Civil Procedure made significant changes to discovery rules of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. In 2016, lesser changes were made to FRCP 4, 6, and 82. This year, the comment period is still open for proposed changes to Federal Rule of Evidence 807 (“FRE 807”) , which addresses the residual exception to hearsay rules.
In 1997, parts of Federal Rules of Evidence 803 and 804 were taken out of those rules and made into a new rule, FRE 807. In 2011, Congress made linguistic changes to FRE 807 “to make them more easily understood and to make style and terminology consistent throughout the rules,” but did not make any changes that would affect meaning. The proposed 2017 changes to Federal Rule of Evidence 807 are the first substantial changes to the rule since it was first adopted 20 years ago.
(2) it is more probative on the point for which it is offered than any other evidence that the proponent can obtain through reasonable efforts.
(b) Notice. The statement is admissible only if, the proponent gives an adverse party reasonable written notice of an intent to offer the statement , including its substance and the declarant’s name — so that the party has a fair opportunity to meet it. The notice must be provided before the trial or hearing — or during trial or hearing if the court, for good cause, excuses a lack of earlier notice.
The Advisory Committee published the following comments discussing the proposed changes to FRE 807, following their Fall 2016 meeting.
The requirement that the court find trustworthiness “equivalent” to the circumstantial guarantees in the Rule 803 and 804 exceptions should be deleted. That standard is exceedingly difficult to apply, because there is no unitary standard of trustworthiness in the Rule 803 and 804 exceptions. It is common ground that statements falling within the Rule 804 exceptions are not as reliable as those admissible under Rule 803; and it is also clear that the bases of reliability differ from exception to exception. Moreover, one of the exceptions subject to “equivalence” review — Rule 804(b)(6) forfeiture — is not based on reliability at all. Given the difficulty of the “equivalence” standard, a better approach is simply to require the judge to find that the hearsay offered under Rule 807 is trustworthy.
Trustworthiness can best be defined as a consideration of both circumstantial guarantees and corroborating evidence. Most courts find corroborating evidence to be relevant to the reliability enquiry, but some do not. An amendment would be useful to provide uniformity in the approach to evaluating trustworthiness under the residual exception — and substantively, that amendment should specifically allow the court to consider corroborating evidence, as corroboration is a typical source for assuring that a statement is reliable.
The requirements in Rule 807 that the residual hearsay must be proof of a “material fact” and that admission of residual hearsay be in “the interests of justice” have not served any purpose. The inclusion of the language “material fact” is in conflict with the studious avoidance of the term “materiality” in Rule 403 — and that avoidance was well-reasoned, because the term “material” is so fuzzy. The courts have essentially held that “material” means “relevant” — and so nothing is added to Rule 807 by including it there. Likewise nothing is added to Rule 807 by referring to the interests of justice because that guidance is already provided by Rule 102. These provisions were added to the residual exception to emphasize that the exception was to be used only in truly exceptional situations. Deleting them might change the tone a bit, to signal that while hearsay must still be reliable to be admitted under Rule 807, there is no longer a requirement that the use must be rare and exceptional.
The requirement in the residual exception that the hearsay statement must be “more probative than any other evidence that the proponent can obtain through reasonable efforts” should be retained. This will preserve the rule that proponents cannot use the residual exception unless they need it. And it will send a signal that the changes proposed are modest — there is no attempt to allow the residual exception to swallow the categorical exceptions, or even to permit the use the residual exception if the categorical exceptions are available.
The Fordham Law Review has published two articles discussing and critical of the proposed changes to FRE 807: “The Three Commandments of Amending the Federal Rules of Evidence” by Victor Gold and “Expanding (or Just Fixing) the Residual Exception to the Hearsay Rule” by Daniel J. Capra.
My recent article “Identifying Improper Requests for Admission” can be found in the Spring 2017 edition of the Alabama Defense Lawyers Association Journal. [I’ll post a link once it’s available]. This article is a touched up and tamped down version of a post that first appeared on the blog here: Beware Bogus Requests for Admission.

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