Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure

Effective December 1, 2010, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 8, 26, and 56, and Illustrative Civil Form 52, were amended (pdf copy available here).  The most notable amendment, in our view, is the amendment to Rule 26, which, generally speaking, precludes discovery into an expert’s communications with counsel (with certain limited exceptions, such as compensation related information and assumptions the expert relied on) and protects an testifying expert’s draft reports from discovery.