Abstract

Across the nation, a growing chorus of judges, lawyers, business leaders, and consumer advocates is calling for reforms to the American civil justice system. Civil litigation, they argue, has become too time-consuming, too expensive, and too unpredictable. To address these concerns, many state and federal courts have begun to develop and implement civil justice reform efforts intended to streamline the litigation process, to minimize the potential for discovery disputes, and to expedite the fair resolution of civil cases. New Hampshire was one of the first jurisdictions to revise its rules of civil procedure with these objectives in mind. The project began under the leadership of Chief Justice John Broderick (ret.) of the Supreme Court of New Hampshire. In 2009 he appointed eight members of the New Hampshire Fellows of the American College of Trial Lawyers. Based on their discussions, the committee ultimately proposed the Proportional Discovery/Automatic Disclosure (PAD) Rules, a set of five rules governing pleadings, case structuring orders, automatic disclosure, written interrogatories and depositions, and discovery of electronically stored information (ESI).To test the rules’ effectiveness, the committee also recommended that the rules be enacted on a pilot basis in Carroll and Strafford Counties.

On April 6, 2010, the Supreme Court of New Hampshire entered an Order adopting the PAD rules on a pilot basis in Carroll and Strafford Counties effective October 1, 2010 with the expectation that the rules would apply to all newly filed civil cases. Before the rules went into effect, the PAD Pilot Rules Committee and the pilot courts undertook a fairly extensive effort to educate the local bar about the changes. To ensure that state courts would have access to reliable information on which to judge the efficacy of those efforts, the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) secured a grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance of the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct evaluations of civil rules reform projects in up to four jurisdictions. With the support of the Supreme Court of New Hampshire, the PAD Pilot Rules were selected as the first project to be evaluated.

This abstract has been taken from the authors' introduction.

Document Type

Report

Publication Date

8-2013

Publication Information

National Center for State Courts (2013)

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