Also known as: undue burdens or expenses · undue burden · undue expense
Written by attorneys · grounded in primary & secondary sources — see below
A standard in civil discovery that permits a court to limit or deny requests when the cost or difficulty of compliance outweighs the likely benefit, taking into account the needs of the case, the amount in controversy, and the parties' resources.
Uma Underwood sued Umbra Technologies for trade-secret misappropriation. Umbra identified ten-year-old server logs stored on decommissioned magnetic tapes that would require forensic restoration costing over four hundred thousand dollars. On motion to compel, the court found the data not reasonably accessible because of undue burden or expense and denied the motion absent a showing of good cause.
Usha Upton and other residents sued the City of Redford alleging police misconduct. The city moved for a protective order against producing seven years of unredacted internal affairs files for an entire unit, citing massive review costs and officer safety risks. The court granted the order after finding good cause that the request would impose undue burden or expense.
Select any source to read its text and confirm it supports the definition.
Ugo Ucelli, a former employee with no stake in the litigation, received a subpoena demanding production of five years of personal email archives. Ugo moved to quash, showing that compliance would require hiring outside vendors at significant personal expense. The court quashed the subpoena because it subjected a nonparty to undue burden.
Ulric Unger sued a distant manufacturer in state court after a product injury. The defendant moved to limit jurisdictional discovery, arguing that locating and producing decades-old sales records from multiple warehouses would impose undue burden or expense far exceeding any relevance to minimum contacts. The court narrowed the requests to recent documents only.
Ursula Ung sought broad financial records from Pacific Mutual Life Ins. Co. to support a punitive damages claim. The insurer moved for a protective order, demonstrating that compiling twenty years of nationwide claims data would require thousands of employee hours and substantial expense. The court limited the request to five years of data to avoid undue burden or expense.
Ultimate Solutions subpoenaed the Seattle Times for confidential source materials in a defamation suit. The newspaper moved for a protective order, showing that identifying and reviewing thousands of archived stories would impose undue burden or expense on its small editorial staff. The court granted the order and limited the subpoena to publicly available articles.
A party need not provide discovery of electronically stored information from sources identified as not reasonably accessible because of undue burden or cost. The responding party must show inaccessibility on a motion to compel or for protective order. If that showing is made, the requesting party may still obtain the information by demonstrating good cause under the proportionality factors of Rule 26(b)(2)(C).
Counsel must conduct a reasonable inquiry into actual search costs, the client's resources, prior discovery already produced, and the amount in controversy. Signing an undue-burden objection without that inquiry violates the certification requirement of Rule 26(g) and can expose counsel to sanctions.
The court may issue a protective order for good cause shown to protect a party from annoyance, embarrassment, oppression, or undue burden or expense. The movant must certify a good-faith effort to resolve the dispute without court action. The order may forbid discovery, limit its scope, or allocate costs.
Yes. The party or attorney issuing the subpoena must take reasonable steps to avoid imposing undue burden or expense on the nonparty. The court must enforce this duty and may impose sanctions, including lost earnings and attorney's fees, for noncompliance.
…the District Court agreed, and concluded that Washington's assisted-suicide ban is unconstitutional because it "places an undue burden on the exercise of [that] constitutionally protected liberty interest." The District Court also decided that the Washington statute violated the Equal Protection Clause's requirement that…