Much has been made of the latest amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, effective December 1, 2015, some going so far as to call them “the most significant change to federal civil practice in the last decade.” In particular, Rule 26 has been amended to include a new “proportionality” provision. Rule 26(b)(1) now limits discovery to “any nonprivileged matter that is relevant to any party’s claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case,” apparently imposing an enormous limitation on the scope of permissible discovery.
The concept of proportionality, however, is nothing new. Even before the 2015 Amendments, Rule 26 provided that discovery should be limited if it “is unduly burdensome or expensive, taking into account the needs of the case, the amount in controversy, limitations on the parties’ resources, and the importance of the issues at stake in the litigation.” The Eastern District of Virginia recently had a chance to grapple with the new rule in a defamation case, and the implication of the court’s holding is essentially that not much has changed, but that litigants and the court should pay a little extra attention to proportionality as they deal with discovery issues.