Criticism of U.S. discovery
The use of discovery has been criticized as favoring the wealthier side, in that it enables parties to drain each other's financial resources in a war of attrition. For example, one can make information requests, which are expensive and time-consuming for the other side to fulfill; produce hundreds of thousands of documents of questionable relevance to the case; file requests for protective orders to prevent the deposition of key witnesses; and so on. In a critique of the U.S. legal profession, attorney and writer Cameron Stracher described a variety of unpleasant tactics common in the United States, and concluded:
“
With the noble sentiment of "levelling the playing field" so that no party has an undue information advantage, the writers of the discovery rules created a multilevel playing field where the information-rich can kick the information-poor in the head and escape unscathed. "Discovery" is anything but ... Hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain the status quo, to preserve the information-rich at the expense of the information-poor. Thousands of lawyer hours to keep the discovery process as unrevealing as possible. The best minds of a generation thinking of new ways to manipulate, distort, and conceal.[7]
”
Tort reform supporters argue that such tactics are often used by plaintiffs' lawyers to impose costs on defendants to force settlements in unmeritorious cases to avoid the cost of discovery. Victim's rights advocates, on the other hand, believe that the opposite is true: defendants typically have greater resources than plaintiffs and, accordingly, they impose costs on parties deserving compensation by dragging out the litigation process as opposed to offering a fair settlement