## Facts

- Nearby residents sued operators of rocket and nuclear-related facilities, alleging injury and property damage from releases of radioactive and toxic substances.
- During discovery, plaintiffs served interrogatories seeking identification of chemicals and radioactive substances used, stored, or released, and contamination sampling and test data.
- Defendants responded largely by invoking Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 33(d), directing plaintiffs to large volumes of business records, with limited narrative answers.
- Defendants also asserted that plaintiffs’ interrogatory answers were incomplete.
- The parties filed cross-motions to compel further interrogatory responses.

## Issues

1. Whether Rule 33(d) permits a responding party to answer interrogatories by pointing to voluminous business records that are not specified, organized, or indexed so the requesting party can locate answers with substantially the same burden as the responding party.
2. Whether defendants’ narrative interrogatory responses, where provided, adequately answered particular interrogatories under Rule 33.
3. Whether plaintiffs’ interrogatory responses were inadequate such that a further response should be compelled.

## Decision

- Plaintiffs’ motion to compel was granted in part and denied in part.
- The court held defendants’ use of Rule 33(d) was improper where defendants effectively relied on unorganized, non-indexed masses of documents rather than specifying responsive records in sufficient detail.
- The court found certain defendant narrative responses adequate where they substantively answered the interrogatories.
- Defendants’ motion to compel further responses from plaintiffs was denied because plaintiffs’ answers were sufficient.

## Legal Principles

- Rule 33(d) may be used only when the responding party specifies the records from which the answer can be derived with enough detail to allow the requesting party to locate and identify responsive information as readily as the responding party.
- A party may not use Rule 33(d) to avoid answering interrogatories by shifting the work to the opponent through undifferentiated document production.
- In document-heavy cases, effective use of Rule 33(d) generally requires meaningful organization and indexing keyed to the interrogatories, so the burden of extracting answers is substantially equivalent for both sides.
- Narrative interrogatory answers that directly and adequately respond to the question satisfy Rule 33 even if business records also exist.

## Conclusion

The court required meaningful specificity and indexing for any Rule 33(d) response and rejected document dumps as a substitute for interrogatory answers, while upholding adequate narrative responses and declining to compel additional answers from plaintiffs.


O’Connor v. Boeing N. Am., Inc., 185 F.R.D. 272 (C.D. Cal. 1999)