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September 10, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a certiorari petition that has been distributed for the U.S. Supreme Court’s Sept. 28 conference, the petitioners argue that allowing “pre-suit discovery” wrongly transforms the statute governing discovery in aid of foreign proceedings into “a weapon for would be private foreign plaintiffs against U.S. residents”; the respondent counters that the statute “permits discovery for use in a reasonably contemplated foreign proceeding, regardless of whether some potential pre-cursor ‘administrative or quasi-judicial proceeding [is] already underway.’”
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September 09, 2026
MIAMI — An insurer and the insurer’s former underwriter stated in a joint status report filed in a Florida federal court that they are holding the remainder of discovery in abeyance as they negotiate a potential resolution to their suit arising from the ex-underwriter’s conduct that the insurer alleges included greatly exceeding his authority by executing a facultative retrocession agreement to cover a risk of more than $44 million.
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September 08, 2026
ATLANTA — Affirming all challenged rulings against two former directors of a bank, the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals issued an unpublished opinion saying in part that it saw “no abuse of discretion in” the trial court’s finding that there was good cause to override an assertion of a so-called “bank examination privilege.”
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September 08, 2026
SALT LAKE CITY — Deciding that failure to disclose a contingency fee for legal services in accordance with a Utah discovery rule means that the fee cannot be awarded as consequential damages, the Utah Supreme Court reversed part of a trial court’s attorney fee ruling in a suit that sprang from a real estate project.
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September 04, 2026
DENVER — A Colorado federal magistrate judge denied a company’s motion to compel discovery of communications an insurer has withheld under the Colorado Fraudulent Claims and Arson Information Reporting Act (AIA) in the company’s suit against its businessowners insurer for breach of contract and statutory bad faith for its purported failure to cover a claim for fire damage to her retail store, finding that the insurer has met its burden to protect the documents at issue from production.
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September 02, 2026
LAS VEGAS — The United States knew that an expert used artificial intelligence to sharpen the grammar and sentence structure in his report for more than two months before attempting to extend a deadline to respond, a federal magistrate judge said Sept. 1 in declining to reopen discovery.
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September 02, 2026
DALLAS — A homeowner insurer and a reinsurance broker filed a joint motion for a protective order in a Texas federal court, seeking the ability to mark as confidential certain forthcoming discovery materials that they consider instrumental to their business practices or containing information not known to the public, in litigation over the remaining breach of contract claim in the insurer’s suit over losses tied to the Vesttoo Ltd. collapse.
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September 01, 2026
WILMINGTON, Del. — A Delaware federal judge refused to grant class certification and denied competing spoliation motions filed by Google LLC and individuals who sued the company for purported privacy violations in a long-running class action, ruling that the individuals did not establish a basis for identifying affected web users, certifying a damages class or obtaining prospective relief.
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September 01, 2026
TRENTON, N.J. — A New Jersey federal magistrate judge on Aug. 31 granted an insured’s motion to determine the triggering date of a pollution liability insurer’s duty to preserve evidence after concluding that the duty to preserve evidence related to the insured’s claim for environmental contamination remediation costs began on the date on which the insurer denied coverage for the claim.
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August 28, 2026
EAST ST. LOUIS, Ill. — Parties to a federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) suit in Illinois involving asbestos attorneys and a pipe manufacturer debated the scope of an order denying a motion to stay discovery and whether a pending motion to dismiss warrants granting a renewed motion seeking a stay.
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August 28, 2026
COLUMBUS, Ohio — A federal magistrate judge in Ohio on Aug. 27 denied an insurer and its insureds’ joint motion to stay discovery deadlines pending their mediation of the insurer’s declaratory judgment lawsuit disputing employment practices liability coverage for an underlying civil lawsuit and a charge of employment discrimination arising from the sexual harassment of its insureds’ minor employee, holding that the parties’ mediation efforts do not preclude them from concurrently proceeding with discovery.
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August 27, 2026
WILMINGTON, Del. — The Delaware Supreme Court denied reargument, leaving in place a ruling holding that discovery rules didn’t permit third parties in asbestos litigation to intervene to block asbestos bankruptcy trusts’ document retention policies allowing the trusts to destroy older claims data that the third parties warned constituted an “unprecedented spoliation of evidence.”
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August 25, 2026
TRENTON, N.J. — A special adjudicator recommended that a New Jersey court grant a motion to compel a company to produce depositions related to asbestos litigation, finding that the case involves asbestos and talc and cannot be limited to just evidence involving talc.
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August 24, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Ukraine on Aug. 21 filed an amended appellee brief telling the District of Columbia Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that a Russian oil company’s appeal of a federal judge’s stay since 2022 of postjudgment discovery to enforce an arbitration award in its favor worth more than $172.9 million is not a proper attempt to attach assets but is instead intended to obtain information that will assist Russia’s military as it “selects targets” in the ongoing war between the two countries.
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August 19, 2026
NEWARK, N.J. — A New Jersey federal judge denied both parties’ requests for sanctions and affirmed a magistrate judge’s order denying the parties’ discovery requests in a breach of contract suit against a COVID-19 test manufacturer and supplier over alleged defective tests, finding that the magistrate judge correctly denied reopening discovery and that sanctions were not merited.
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August 18, 2026
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Partly granting a petition for a writ of mandamus in a bad faith case against a homeowners insurer, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that including a sharing provision in a protective order does not inherently violate the state’s discovery rules, but here the order “must be modified to ensure that the information is not shared in a manner that harms” the insurer; four justices wrote separately to concur in the result or partly or fully dissent, and a fifth justice joined in the full dissent.
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August 18, 2026
EAST ST. LOUIS, Ill. — A federal judge in Illinois granted expedited third-party discovery from asbestos trusts in a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) case in the wake of a Delaware Supreme Court ruling allowing the trusts to implement new document retention policies.
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August 18, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Saying that it did not “see an adequate basis for mandamus relief,” the District of Columbia Court of Appeals denied a petition that sought to keep Meta Platforms Inc. and Instagram LLC (together, Meta) from having to produce material that a lower court deemed “subject to the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege.”
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August 17, 2026
SEATTLE — Giving the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) a victory on an issue that is the focus of numerous lawsuits, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on Aug. 14 issued a 2-1 ruling reversing quashal of an administrative subpoena for patient medical and communications data from a gender-affirming care provider and remanding for further proceedings; the majority concluded that the provider “has not met its heavy burden of showing that the subpoena was issued for an improper purpose,” and the dissenter said, “That the President may lawfully voice policy opposition to a practice does not mean the DOJ can exceed its statutory authority and issue pretextual subpoenas to put a company out of business.”
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August 17, 2026
NEW YORK — OpenAI entities defending consolidated copyright actions told a federal judge in New York on Aug. 14 that the news plaintiffs have built a request for sanctions for alleged discovery violations on routine discovery practices in heavily litigated cases and a mischaracterization of events.
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August 17, 2026
ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Denying a “request for entry of a protective order requiring ten days’ advance notice before engaging in communications with an opponent’s former employees” in a putative class action over alleged antitrust violations, a New York federal magistrate judge said in part that the movants’ “generalized concerns regarding potential exposure to privileged information do not satisfy their burden in this context.”
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August 14, 2026
EAST ST. LOUIS, Ill. — Partly granting a request to compel production of insurance-related documents in a class action that concerns the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), an Illinois federal judge ruled after in camera review that some of the documents “are not subject to any privilege” and must be produced but others “need not be produced” because they are not relevant.
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August 13, 2026
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Affirming the trial court’s rulings in a case that arose from a probate dispute and saying in part that “the record does not support that the Estate presented evidence sufficient to support its discovery violation argument,” the Wyoming Supreme Court found no abuse of discretion in the lower court’s refusal to impose sanctions for alleged violation of discovery orders; it also found no clear error in the trial court’s conclusion that “the Estate had failed to prove its case.”
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August 12, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — Meta Platforms Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg must sit for a deposition in consolidated artificial intelligence copyright actions after a federal judge in California denied a motion to quash the apex deposition, according to an Aug. 11 docket entry.
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August 12, 2026
RICHMOND, Va. — A federal bankruptcy judge in Virginia has denied an insurer’s motion to modify a 2024 mediation order to allow the insurer to use documents produced by Hopeman Brothers Inc. during mediation in connection with the prosecution of its claim in Hopeman’s Chapter 11 case, finding that the requested relief conflicts with a local bankruptcy rule and that the insurer “failed to provide a compelling legal or factual basis for this Court to impinge upon a confidential judicial mediation.”