Document Production Must Be Proportionate, Not Exhaustive

In K.A.R. v. Dawson, 2026 BCSC 848 the Court overturned an interlocutory order compelling the plaintiff to produce all literature and textbooks reference by their expert psychiatrist in his medical-legal report. The Court found the order was over-broad and confirmed there are limits on a party’s requirement to produce documents:

…Rule 11-6 does not require a party to collect and produce an entire body of external literature merely because it is referred to in general terms in an expert report. Rather, the Rule requires disclosure only of those materials necessary to permit the opinion to be tested fairly and effectively. In this case, that objective could have been achieved through greater specificity in identifying the particular materials actually relied upon, rather than by ordering wholesale production of the broader literature.

This ruling reflects a thread running through the case law, that there are limits to document production demands from a defendant. Fairness does not require the plaintiff to exhaust themselves financially or otherwise to get all possible relevant documents, that is, there is a limit at which point document production of marginally relevant documents will be unfair to the plaintiff and should not be their burden to bear.