I Thought Discovery Was About Finding Answers. I Was Wrong.

When discovery began in our probate case, I honestly didn't know the first thing about it. In fact, I didn't even realize we had entered what I would later understand as the discovery phase until the other side served us first.

Requests for Admission. Interrogatories. Pages and pages of questions we had to answer.

At first, I was mostly concerned with figuring out what these documents were, what we were supposed to do with them, and when they were due. Like so much of representing myself, I focused on whatever was immediately in front of me.

Eventually, we began serving our own discovery. By then, I thought I understood what discovery was about. . . I thought it was about finding answers.

I was wrong.

We Were Looking for Evidence

We were challenging my mother's trust based on lack of capacity, undue influence, and financial elder abuse. So when we started thinking about the information we needed, I naturally focused on evidence that might help us understand what had happened.

What was my mother's condition around the time the trust was created? Who was involved? What was happening financially? What happened to certain assets?

Those were the questions we were trying to answer.

By then, I had also learned that believing something was unfair wasn't enough. Six children had been disinherited and one child inherited everything. That may have been what made us start asking questions, but unfairness wasn't one of the legal claims we had made.

We needed evidence to support those claims.

So that's what I thought discovery was for: finding the facts and evidence that might help us understand what had happened.

Then I started paying closer attention to the questions the other side was asking us.

Why Were They Asking About That?

Their discovery focused on something very different.

They asked about our relationships with our mother. They called us estranged. They brought up old disagreements and arguments . . . some from years earlier, and some that went back decades.

What struck me was how differently those events could be characterized. To me, many of them were the kinds of disagreements that happen in families. But in their questions, they sounded much worse. Put together, they seemed to paint a picture of children who had been estranged from their mother.

And that wasn't the relationship I remembered.

We were trying to understand what was happening with our mother around the time she created and amended her trust. What was her condition? Who was around her? What was happening financially?

So I kept wondering why we were spending so much time talking about arguments from years earlier.

And when we responded, we didn't simply write “Deny.” We explained that we had photographs showing us spending holidays, birthdays, and vacations with our mother, including during the period when the trust was created.

I wanted the evidence to speak for itself. Yes, there had been disagreements. We were a family. But those disagreements didn't necessarily tell the whole story of our relationship with our mother.

Eventually, I began to understand why those old disagreements might matter to the other side.

They weren't necessarily trying to answer the same questions we were asking.

I Started to Understand the Story They Were Telling

Until then, I had looked at discovery almost entirely from our side. What did we need to know? What evidence could we find? What documents could we obtain?

Their discovery made me realize that they were focused on telling a different story.

We were focused on what was happening with our mother around the time she created and amended her trust. But if they could characterize us as estranged from her, the story could move in another direction.

So, for them, instead of focusing on What was happening with Mom when she changed her estate plan?, their focus would become Didn't Mom have a reason to leave these children out?

Suddenly, those questions about old arguments made more sense to me.

I couldn't know exactly what their attorney was thinking or what they would ultimately argue. But I could see the story their discovery seemed to be developing.

And I also began to understand why our responses mattered. If their questions characterized us as estranged, we didn't have to simply accept that characterization. We could answer truthfully and identify the evidence we had that showed a fuller picture.

That was something I hadn't expected to learn from discovery.

If You're Just Beginning Discovery

If you're at this stage of your own probate case, the terminology alone can feel overwhelming. Requests for Admission, interrogatories, Requests for Production of Documents, depositions, subpoenas. I didn't know what any of these things were when we started.

I created a video explaining the major discovery tools we encountered, what each one is designed to do, and what the process looked like from the perspective of someone learning it while representing herself.

Discovery Was About More Than Finding Answers

When those first discovery requests arrived, I thought the challenge would be figuring out what discovery was and how to find the information we needed.

But discovery taught me something I wasn't looking for.

The questions the other side asked showed me where they might try to take the story. And our responses gave us an opportunity to make sure their characterization wasn't the only one on the page.

I went into discovery thinking the important part would be finding answers.

What I didn't expect was how much I would learn from the questions.