In Download Smith v. State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co. (E.D. Mich. Case No. 10.11016, Memorandum and Order Filed March 4, 2011) PUBLIC ACCESS, Ms. Trinity Smith filed suit for no-fault benefits for injuries arising from a motorcycle accident. Nationwide, the Defendant, filed a motion to dismiss her Complaint "for Smith's failure to comply with discovery." Id. at *1.
In the Federal Judge's opinion, "Smith has pushed the limits in her failure to cooperate". However, the Court denied the motion to dismiss for failure to provide discovery, i.e., for failure to provide a detailed computation of damages which every Plaintiff seeking damages in Federal Court is automatically required to provide to a Defendant. Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26, there is no need of any request to produce it. In fact, under many Local Rules, discovery is postponed in the case until the Rule-required time period for exchanging required information is over. In this case, "under the present set of facts, dismissal is premature," in the Federal Court's opinion, because of "a breakdown in communications between Smith's counsel and Smith," in basic and simple terms. Id. at *2.
The most interesting and significant aspect of this Insurance Claim, among many interesting and significant aspects particularly to the parties, is that the required disclosure of a detailed computation of damages under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26 was considered under a motion to dismiss for "failure to provide discovery." Failure to provide "discovery" can lead to a motion under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37 Rule 37 motions ordinarily involve requests for discovery rather than failure to obey the Federal Rules, although Rule 37(a)(3)(A) makes provision for enforcement of required disclosure under Rule 26.. In this case, the parties based their arguments and the Federal Judge based the Court's decision on the ground of a failure to provide discovery. There is an aggressive, perhaps "robust" argument available here, however, that the issue in this peculiar case involved instead an asserted failure of a party to obey the Federal Rules which required disclosure. Here, that party was the Plaintiff who invoked the Federal Rules when she filed her Complaint in Federal Court.
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