Do Lawyers Ever Agree? The Meet and Confer Requirement Under California Law

[Music] Hi this is Stuart Albert's head of Albertson and Davidson and I want to talk to you briefly about the meet and confer requirement that is imposed on us by many statutes in California law a mead confer is where we are required as lawyers to meet with one another whether it's in writing or on the phone or at lunch or wherever we might meet maybe at the courthouse after a hearing and discuss certain issues in a case to see if we can come to resolution of the issues ourselves just the lawyers and as you can probably guess it rarely happens where lawyers come to resolution on these matters but the law wants us to attempt to try to resolve any differences we have in the case before we go and file any type of motion with the court we see these meet confer requirements in Discovery all the time so we propound discovery to the other side which are written questions saying that you must respond to our written questions within a certain time frame generally thirty days once those answers come back in if we're not satisfied that they were answered properly under the Discovery Act we can't just run off to court file a motion waste the judges time waste the court administrators time with emotion prior to doing what we call a meet and confer and it's a lengthy process we're required to draft a long meet for a letter to the opposing attorney and explain why we think they need to answer the discovery better many times they'll tell us they think they've answered discovery just fine and if you think you need to file a motion to compel go ahead and then we filed a motion to compel and ask the court to order the other side to answer the questions as required by the discovery act it's important though that we do that meet confer process first or the judge is not going to listen to our motion the judge wants to make sure that we at least attempt between the lawyers to resolve the differences before we run off to court and file a motion recently California amended several of its statutes regarding tumor and motion for judgment on the pleadings and those are that we generally see right at the beginning of a case and we saw many defendants using these just as a response to any case that was filed against their client they would just automatically file a demur or a motion for judgment on the pleadings California law says now we want the lawyers to meet and confer prior to filing a demur or motion for judgment on the pleadings the whole idea behind me confer again is for the lawyers who are hopefully responsible adults to sit down analyze the case analyze the chances of winning or losing a particular motion whether it's a demur motion for judgment on the pleadings motion to compel additional discovery have them meet confer and hopefully resolve that matter between themselves as responsible adults before we have to go tattle to the judge and get the judge to make a decision about what needs to happen I will tell you this judges generally don't like to have lawyers fighting in court over something that they should have been able to resolve outside of court so your lawyers will attempt hopefully to do the best they can to resolve matters through the meet and confer process if they're unable then they'll file whatever motion they need to to enforce your rights. [Music] [Applause] [Music]