Federal Judges Blow Their Stacks Over Boilerplate Objections

A little less than two weeks apart, two federal judges emphatically let practitioners in their districts know how much they despise boilerplate objections to written discovery. Both judges delivered the same message: boilerplate objections violate the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, are not valid objections and could subject parties or their attorneys to sanctions.

In the first order, Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck of the Southern District of New York expressed his disgust for boilerplate objections in just a few pages and most of those pages involved direct quotations from the Federal Rules, the Advisory Committee Notes to the rules and the specific requests for production and the responses to those requests. Stripped of the quotations, Judge Peck used fewer than a dozen paragraphs in Fischer v. Forrest, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 28012 (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 28, 2017), to explain that boilerplate objections violate the Federal Rules in at least four ways.