Court Opinion

ID: 9624947
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 07:22:41.261313+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:05:57.240018
License: Public Domain

Utter, J.
(dissenting)—I dissent. CR 33(c), added to our discovery rules in 1972, is a direct copy of revisions made earlier to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure effective July 1, 1970. The history of those rules illustrates they were enacted to deal with the situation where interrogatories require a party to engage in burdensome or expensive research into their own business records in order to give an answer. The Advisory Committee's Note on the federal rules revision states:
The subdivision gives the party an option to make the records available and place the burden of research on the party who seeks the information. "This provision, without undermining the liberal scope of interrogatory discovery, places the burden of discovery upon its potential benefitee," Louisell, Modern California Discovery, 124-125 (1963), and alleviates a problem which in the past has troubled Federal courts. See Speck, The Use of Discovery in United States District Courts, 60 Yale L.J. 1132, 1142-1144 (1951).
48 F.R.D. 487, 524 (1970).
Respondent's principal argument for requiring petitioner to conduct the search was that she had "limited resources" *639to conduct her own search of the record. The term "burden" used in the comments refers to feasibility of search, not financial cost. No case indicates financial ability is the "burden" referred to in CR 33(c) and the Advisory Committee's Note shows those who drafted the rule contemplated placing the onus of discovery on the one who benefited from it. Where, as here, the father of the minor is a practicing physician, I believe it violates the spirit of the rule to require petitioner to sift through its own records to make respondent's case. Respondent minor's father has the education to equip him to ascertain the required information. This is not a case of abuse of trial court discretion but simply exercise of discretion in an area where none is permitted by the rule.
Brachtenbach, J., concurs with Utter, J.