CIVIL PROCEDURE — discovery and disclosure — Practice Note SC Eq 11 — whether exceptional circumstances warrant disclosure before evidence exchanged
Quick Take
1Where a plaintiff's evidence-in-chief is complete and the documents sought are necessary for the defendants to understand the case they must meet and to prepare their responsive evidence, exceptional circumstances under Practice Note SC Eq 11 paragraph 4 may be established to permit pre-evidence disclosure.
2Subpoenas and notices to produce using expressions such as 'relating to' or 'in relation to' that require the recipient to make subjective judgments about whether documents fall within a category remain impermissibly wide, and a subpoena requiring consultation of extrinsic documents with open-ended definitions to identify the documents sought lacks reasonable particularity.
3A notice to produce category seeking documents recording development costs without temporal limitation is not oppressive where the party relying on those costs in its own evidence can reasonably be expected to produce the underlying source documents.
Case Details
Citation[2026] NSWSC 922
CourtNSWSC
JurisdictionNew South Wales
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