Litigation terms
Meet and confer
Meet and confer is the required good-faith negotiation between counsel before bringing a discovery dispute to the court — the procedural gate that turns deficient responses into motions to compel.
Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(a)(1) requires a movant to certify they conferred (or attempted to) in good faith before seeking to compel; local rules often specify the mechanics — some demanding live conversation rather than letters, some requiring joint statements of what remains disputed. The same conferral machinery front-ends protective-order motions and, in many courts, discovery of ESI generally.
Why it matters in practice
The meet-and-confer letter is written for two audiences: opposing counsel today and the judge later. The craft is specificity — request by request, what was asked, what was produced, what is missing, and why the objection fails — because vague grievances produce vague conferrals, and judges deny motions where the conferral was performative. A well-documented sequence (deficiency letter, call, follow-up confirming agreements and impasses) both narrows the dispute and builds the exhibit stack for the motion that follows.
Substance wins conferrals: “your production contains no documents from custodian X for March–May, though produced emails reference weekly reports” is hard to wave away. Generalized suspicion is easy to.
In the fact record
That specificity is inventory work. A coverage view that tracks what each production actually contains — against what the requests demanded and what other documents reference — writes the deficiency letter’s factual core.