If Dante had practiced law, there’s a good chance he would have added a tenth circle of hell—discovery for defense attorneys. Imagine being slowly crushed under a mountain of PDFs, emails from 2007, and inexplicably sticky banker’s boxes. Let’s face it, some of us could update our bios to include—professional document archaeologist.

Discovery was theoretically designed to ensure fairness and transparency. In practice, it’s trying to figure out how to answer a 50-part interrogatory asking for every moment your client thought about the matter at issue since the Nixon administration. Then, only after countless weeks of negotiating a 32-page ESI stipulation covering every conceivable piece of metadata that could exist, comes document production.  The point at which you become your client’s part-time IT technician, therapist, and professional nag.  Which is followed by the 25,000 emails you have to comb through. Half of which are “Reply All” threads that devolved into inter-office lunch orders and passive-aggressive calendar invites. Still, you must review every single one because hidden among those chain emails is inevitably one relevant piece of information. . .followed by a dog GIF.

Which then brings us to the redaction rodeo. Where we redact things like phone numbers, addresses, and trade secrets. And plaintiffs assume we’re redacting anything that could conceivably give them the upper hand. Same goes for privilege logging.  All of which leads to the inevitable motions to compel.  It’s far from perfect; but it’s the system we’ve got and so we’ve got to work within it. Which means fighting the good fight when we need to, like the defendants did in State v. Optumrx, Inc., 2025 La. App. LEXIS 1167 (La. Ct. App. Jun. 20, 2025).

The State brought a lawsuit claiming that two Medicaid service providers inflated prescription drug prices charged to the Louisiana Medicaid program.  The State alleged that the providers “fraudulently concealed” the actual costs and failed to give the State contractually required access to records and data that would show the overpayments.  Id. at *4.   In discovery, the State sought to require defendants to turn over a huge amount of information about the defendants’ contracts and activities in other states. The trial court overruled the defendants’ relevance objections and sanctioned defendants when they refused to produce that material.  The sanction ruling created an appealable order.

Louisiana rules allow for discovery of “any matter, not privileged, that is relevant to the subject matter in the pending action.”  Id. at *10.  And while discovery statutes are “to be liberally construed” and trial courts are given “broad discretion,” that discretion is not absolute. So, the appellate court started with the subject matter of the suit: defendants’ provision of prescription drug coverage to Louisiana Medicaid recipients and whether defendants caused Louisiana to overpay for prescription drugs.  Id. at *11-12. The trial court allowed the out-of-state discovery finding that the State alleged defendants’ pricing scheme in Louisiana was part of a nationwide effort.  To which the appellate court said—not really and so what.

The State’s petition “vaguely alleges” problems with defendants’ pricing “as a whole.” But the suit is limited, as it must be, to allegations of improper price inflation in Louisiana. Moreover, defendants pricing structure with other states is governed by unique contracts with those states that were the subject of state-specific negotiations and concessions.  Therefore, the appellate court rejected “the speculative notion” that evidence of defendants’ pricing structures and contracts with other states—similar or different—was relevant or  would lead to the discovery of relevant information about how defendants administered Louisiana’s Medicaid program. Id. at *13-14. The trial court abused its discretion in ordering the out-of-state discovery.

The rest of the decision addresses various sanctions imposed on defendants regarding other discovery requests.  All but one sanction was overturned and most are case-specific. But we did want to point out that one of the sanctions was for failing to produce information that did not exist. Defendants proffered unrefuted affidavits from their in-house e-discovery director and one of their attorneys explaining that claims data from certain years did not exist because defendants did not provide services in those years.  Since defendants can only produce things that are in their “possession, custody, and control,” the appellate court found that the trial court “manifestly erred” in finding defendants had the data and abused its discretion by sanctioning defendants for not providing it.  Id. at *21. 

Discovery is a process. One filled with the constant fear that you’ve accidentally produced your client’s personal tax returns from 1998. Trial courts that order wildly disproportionate discovery that is wholly unrelated to the claims of the case and impose sanctions for failing to produce documents that don’t exist turn an already difficult and unpleasant process into a full-blown nightmare. Fortunately, this one had a happy ending, but discovery appeals are few and far between.   So, the next time someone tells you they want to go to law school to “argue in court,” take them aside and whisper softly: “Have you ever used Relativity?”