Breaking Barriers to Justice
Feigned Ignorance Should Not Be Bliss: How to Handle “No Responsive Documents Exist” in Discovery By Jasleen Singh
You serve requests for production. Back come responses: “no responsive documents exist.” That seems perplexingly wrong; you were certain they would, or at least, should. This is a familiar response from major international corporations like auto manufacturers or tech companies with entities in the U.S. and abroad (Ford, Volkswagen, Samsung, Kia, etc.). The premise is that the U.S. entity is “just a distributor,” while the design, manufacturing, and quality roles all conveniently belong to an overseas parent company. The problem? This is rarely true. To sell a product in the U.S., the national companies must comply with U.S. federal regulations and report to domestic agencies. They must either have the necessary engineering, safety, design, and warranty information on hand, or they can readily receive, transmit and rely on it. Employees in the U.S. and abroad are interfacing daily via email. The data evidently exists for the purpose of business. Yet, for the purpose of litigation, it either “never existed” or is too far out of reach. As a result, litigating against large, international corporations is a behemoth of an undertaking with inequity closing in
on every turn. At the outset, consumers lack bargaining power. By the time litigation arises, consumers are left in the dark. Big companies frequently have deep pockets, stretchable time, and complex overseas structures they can utilize to escape from discovery obligations. To break this barrier to justice and effectively pursue consumer rights and safety, as advocates, we need to comfortably hold our ground in discovery, think creatively and outside the box, and persist to, through, and after trial. And these tactics are not new, they’ve just adapted over the last thirty years. In 1996, a physician claimed responsive documents from the FDA or independent review board were “stolen” ( Vallbona v. Springer (1996) 43 Cal.App.4th 1525). In 2006, an automaker concealed crash-test data for years ( Karlsson v. Ford Motor Co. (2006) 140 Cal.App.4th 1202). In 2022, an automaker performed an electronically stored information (ESI) search in a way that was sure to return zero hits ( Higginson v. Kia Motors America, Inc . (2026) 118 Cal.App.5th 316). In 2025, I had a case against auto manufacturer, Volkswagen, that claimed it could not produce any documents related to its design, safety, and manufacturing because they did not exist. Instead, Volkswagen’s verified discovery responses swore the documents belonged to Volkswagen AG (Germany) and were not within its “custody, possession, or control.” So, what next?
Jasleen Singh is an associate attorney at Altair Law® based in San Francisco, CA. She practices personal injury litigation in cases involving severe injury or death. jsingh@altairlaw.com
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Consumer Attorneys of California
FORUM July/August 2026
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