Fighting discover abuse in litigation.

Over the years, discovery has been transformed from a tool to gather facts during litigation to a tactical weapon. Discovery abuse involves excessive or improper use of discovery devices to harass, cause delay, wear down opponents, and/or ‘stonewalling’ or opposing proper discover requests to frustrate the other party. This paper provides an overview of the various discovery devices and highlights numerous predatory discovery practices. We then show how a collaborative or team approach can be combined with standard discovery tools to obtain critical evidence from an opposing party bent on discovery abuse. An improved understanding of these issues will place forensic accountants in a better position to assist attorneys in litigation. Towards the end of the paper we provide a list of research questions that could be useful to academic researchers in crafting a responsive research agenda that exploits insights from the behavioral sciences.