In many cases of medical malpractice, patients face the problem of determining which person or persons are responsible for their injuries. This is particularly true when a patient is treated by dozens of doctors, nurses, and other care providers over a period of days, weeks, or even months. Rule 30(b)(6) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and its state equivalents, allows patients to take the deposition of a representative of the defendant hospital, nursing home, or other care facility. This tool requires such a facility to answer questions about who and what caused a patient’s injury, so that a patient does not need to depose all of the individuals who treated him to find out exactly who did what. If patients had to take all of those depositions, they would likely get many conflicting stories about what happened, with different care givers trying to avoid blame by pointing the finger elsewhere.

Defendant healthcare facilities have raised numerous arguments for why Rule 30(b)(6) should not apply to them. In the Opinion attached below, the court described the multiple arguments that a defendant hospital made to try to block a Rule 30(b)(6) deposition, and explained why those arguments were unfounded. This case involved a quadriplegic patient with limited use of his arms who was admitted to a hospital’s rehabilitation unit following shoulder surgery, after which he was completely immobilized. While he was at the hospital, the patient developed a pressure wound on his buttocks that resulted in months of surgeries and hospitalization. While he was in the rehabilitation unit, the patient was treated by over 40 doctors, nurses, and aides over the course of a two-week period.

The hospital tried to block the Rule 30(b)(6) deposition with several arguments, including:

The deposition would cover some of the same ground already discovered by the plaintiff through interrogatories and document requests.

The hospital should not have to designate a representative to speak for the hospital as a whole because it could make all of the doctors, nurses, and aides who treated the patient available for individual depositions.

Designating a representative to speak for the hospital required it to perform a peer-review investigation (which in many jurisdictions are confidential and non-discoverable in a law suit).

A Rule 30(b)(6) representative should not be required to give a hospital’s opinion about who and what caused the patient’s injury, and should only have to report the facts.

In this case, the court rejected all of these arguments, adopting the reasoning in Wilson v. Lakner, 228 F.R.D. 524 (D. Md. 2005), which is one of the few published decisions about Rule 30(b)(6) depositions in the medical malpractice context.