Introduction
Discovery is the pretrial process in a lawsuit whereby each party is given the opportunity to employ civil procedure in order to obtain evidence that it deems pertinent to its arguments in the case. Litigation is meant to be a fair process in which every party that is before the court is given the best possible chance to defend their arguments by the use of evidence. In civil law, discovery is employed to help even the ground during trial and to ensure that as much as possible, justice is served, additionally, discovery gives both parties the time to obtain relevant facts through the discovery tools and procedure so that when they appear before the court of law they are ready to proceed thus saving time and avoiding …show more content…
This is usually true for several military cases that are tried in civilian courts due to the nature of events. Whereas the military attorneys can get full discovery to the evidence and documents of the civilian lawyers, the civilian lawyers may not get access to certain pertinent military documents that may be categorized as classified. The same applies to documents and individuals to which sensitive data such as unpatented prototypes found and those pertaining to witness protection or covered by attorney-client privilege among other types of privileged …show more content…
Discovery of documents involves making known or disclosing to the other part every relevant document that can be used to prove or disprove material facts. This means that the documents must be described and made available to the parties for examination. In examination for discovery, the parties in the case (lawyers) meet and ask each other a series of questions aimed at extracting important information. Interrogatories are questions that are written out and given to the other party who must also respond in writing; their use in a court of law must be done only with leave of the court. Pre-trial examination of witnesses is often conducted when there is a person who was not a part of the action but has pertinent information on the case at hand and can only be used with leave of the court. Notices to admit allow the parties to ask one another the truth regarding certain facts. It is important to note that only facts can be admitted and not opinions, or matters of law. Last but not least, as part of discovery, physical and mental examination of a party to the case may be allowed by the court at its discretion (Supremecourtbc.ca,