Court Opinion

ID: 9516359
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-06 23:41:17.767091+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:35:10.955814
License: Public Domain

BROWN, J.
(concurring). I acknowledge that we are bound by the holding of Ranft v. Lyons, 163 Wis. 2d 282.286.471 N.W.2d 254, 255 (Ct. App. 1991). For that reason, I concur in the opinion of this court. I write separately, however, to register my disagreement with Ranft.
As the court in Ranft conceded, the majority rule in the United States is that a party is entitled not only to know before trial whether he or she has been subjected to photographic or video surveillance, but to have pretrial access to the surveillance materials as well. Id. at 300.471 N.W.2d at 261. The Ranft court listed only two reasons for this majority rule: (1) modern litigation favors access to all relevant material over gamesmanship and (2) there exists the possibility that the surveillance materials might be misleading or deceptive. Id. The Ranft court then rejected these two reasons, without any evaluation, as sufficient rationales requiring disclosure. Id.
*599Rather, the Ranft court declared that surveillance tapes are "workproduct" because they are part of how a lawyer goes about evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of a case. Id. at 301, 471 N.W.2d at 261. The Ranft court concluded that the tapes therefore do not have to be produced prior to trial unless it can be shown that the failure to disclose would "unnecessarily frustrate" the "objectives of pretrial discovery" or, alternatively, that there is "good cause" requiring disclosure. Id. The Ranft panel determined that "[i]f defendants wish to use any surveillance materials at trial, the trial court should give the Ranfts ample opportunity to challenge the materials outside the jury's presence prior to any decision on their admissibility." Id. at 303, 471 N.W.2d at 262.
In my view, the Ranft panel neglected to mention a third reason why the majority of courts require disclosure of surveillance tapes. The third reason is that disclosure permits accurate assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of a case, thus fostering settlement and freeing the courts and parties of a costly trial. See, e.g., Olszewski v. Howell, 253 A.2d 77, 78 (Del. Super. Ct. 1969).
From a law and economics perspective, this reason militates in favor of the majority rule. The greater the stakes, the more that parties will spend on litigation. The increasing probability of a favorable outcome justifies the expense. Laws should be designed to increase the productivity of the parties' litigation expenditures. If the expected value of the outcome declines, then settlement is a greater possibility. So, if the plaintiff knows that he or she has been a subject of videotape surveillance and further suspects that the surveillance will hamper his or her credibility, there is less chance of the case going to trial.
*600Judge Richard Posner has theorized that a full exchange of information in the possession of the parties is likely to facilitate settlement by enabling each party to form a more accurate, and generally more convergent, estimate of the likely outcome of the case. Compulsion is necessary since, in normal bargaining, each party has the incentive to withhold information-knowing that if negotiations fail, the information will be more valuable at trial if the opponent has not had the opportunity to prepare a rebuttal to it. Richard A. Posner, Economic Analysis of Law 437 (2d ed. 1977);
Although the Ranft court did not address the cost-effectiveness aspect of disclosure, I have an idea about how that court might respond. In a footnote to the opinion, the court posits that revelation of surveillance materials prior to trial renders the material subject to "post-hoc explanations" which "can always, at least partially, defuse damaging . . . testimony." Ranft, 163 Wis. 2d at 303 n.8, 471 N.W.2d at 262.
The result, it would seem to be argued, is that settlement would not be fostered since the plaintiff could take strategic maneuvers to lessen the impact of the surveillance tape by the time of trial. I would disagree. It is difficult — if not impossible — to soften the impact of a damaging videotape.
Perhaps the Ranft court did not mean this to be, but the decision seems to choose an unannounced policy goal over the policy goal of cost-effective litigation. This unannounced policy goal is that showing jurors a video catching personal injury plaintiffs in a probable lie is a good thing — it serves the truth-finding function of litigation. The policy goal of showing the jury that the plaintiff has been caught lying is deemed more *601important than disclosing the video at pretrial and cost effectively settling the case or gaining dismissal of it.1
I do not favor the policy of going to trial simply to allow jurors to see a videotape. The exhilaration that a defense attorney might gain from seeing the look on an opposing lawyer's face when the tape is played does not, in my opinion, justify the cost involved in trying the case. I would hope that, someday, our supreme court might have the opportunity to visit the issue discussed in Ranft and reach a different result.

 This policy goal is probably a part of two correlative assumptions. One is that the fear of being exposed in front of a jury will cause lying plaintiffs to be more risk averse toward filing frivolous suits than toward exposure during the pretrial process. The other is that threat of exposure in front of a jury will deter a plaintiffs lawyer from pursuing meritless claims. I reject both. The assumptions presuppose that laypersons know about the Ranft decision and will therefore choose to sue or not to sue after listening to the " 'inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking..'" Ranft v. Lyons, 163 Wis. 2d 282, 302-03, 471 N.W.2d 254, 262 (Ct. App. 1991) (quoting H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy 617 (1956)). This is a false assumption. As well, lawyers have no immediate reason to believe that their clients are lying to them when the clients tell the lawyer about the things they could do before the accident that they cannot do now. Finally, to the extent that a possible plaintiff might be more risk averse to suing because of knowledge that a videotape might be shown to the jury, the empirical data supporting the cost effectiveness of settlement far outweighs a theory with no empirical support.