Discovery Management

The Civil Justice Reform Act of 1990 (CJRA) required that each federal district court develop a case management plan to reduce costs and delay. The legislation also created a pilot program to test six principles of case management and required an independent evaluation to assess their effects. After the main evaluation report was completed, the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules of the Judicial Conference of the United States asked RAND to conduct further analyses of the CJRA evaluation data to see if additional light could be shed on discovery management. The report uses both descriptive tabulations and statistical techniques to assess policy effects. Management policies are evaluated when used in various combinations, such as early management in combination with discovery plans and early scheduling of a trial date. Also analyzed are subsets of cases or lawyers, such as high complexity cases only, high stakes cases only, contingent fee lawyers only, or tort cases only. For each type of case, data include time to disposition, lawyer satisfaction with judicial case management, lawyer views on the fairness of judicial case management, total lawyer work hours per litigant, lawyer work hours on discovery, and the number of discovery motions filed.