Technology’s Effect on Advocacy
to catch real-time coaching, outlines the remedies available under existing authority, and proposes a rule designed not just to punish misconduct at remote depositions, but to deter it before it occurs.
authority under CCP §§ 2023.010 and 2023.030. PwC held that trial courts may invoke independent authority to impose monetary sanctions under those statutes “when confronted with an unusual form of discovery abuse, or a pattern of abuse, not already addressed by a relevant sanctions provision." (Id. at p. 74.) The California Supreme Court grounded this in the Legislature's "central purpose" of giving trial courts "the tools necessary to respond to those abuses to ensure that civil discovery can serve its central truth-seeking function." (Id. at p. 73.) Together, PwC and Agnone give California trial courts clear statutory and appellate authority to sanction remote-deposition misconduct that obstructs the truth-seeking process, even where the conduct falls outside the specific deposition sanctions provisions of the Discovery Act. The conclusion that coaching is sanctionable discovery misuse is not new. In Tucker v. Pacific Bell Mobile Services (2010) 186 Cal.App.4th 1548, the California Court of Appeal affirmed sanctions under CCP § 2023.030 where counsel passed a note to the deponent during questioning and told her not to divulge its contents. (Id. at pp. 1561-1562.) Agnone cited Tucker as one of the cases where California courts had correctly relied on CCP §§ 2023.010 and 2023.030 to sanction coaching, and Joven relied on Tucker for the same proposition in support of its tentative ruling supporting terminating sanctions. Tucker is now nearly fifteen years old and predates the videoconference era, but it remains the correct proposition that coaching is sanctionable misuse. Agnone has now updated that doctrine for remote depositions. In August 2023, the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility issued Formal Opinion 508. The Opinion confirmed that real-time witness coaching
The Current Law
In Agnone v. Agnone (2025) 111 Cal.App.5th 758, the deposing party's counsel objected that the deponent's attorney was sitting in the same conference room as the witness but refused to turn on his webcam, despite repeated requests. The deposing counsel observed that the witness was looking off- screen toward his attorney before each answer. When the deposing counsel terminated the deposition and sought sanctions, the trial court awarded them under CCP §§ 2023.010 and 2023.030. The Court of Appeal affirmed, holding that CRC 3.1010 does not authorize counsel to participate by audio only when physically present with the deponent, because such conduct creates the opportunity for surreptitious coaching outside the deposing party's view. (Id. at p. 766.) Critically, the court held that no proof of actual coaching was required. The conduct that frustrates the ability to monitor for coaching is itself sanctionable misuse of the discovery process, because it "made it impossible to tell — and thus impossible to develop evidence of — whether [counsel] was attempting to coach [the deponent]." (Ibid.) The Court concluded the trial court had reasonably exercised its discretion to sanction this “unusual form of discovery abuse” that “plainly frustrated the deposition’s ‘truth-seeking function.’” (Id. at p. 767.) Agnone rests on the California Supreme Court's 2024 decision in City of Los Angeles v. PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP (2024) 17 Cal.5th 46, which clarified the scope of trial-court sanctions
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Consumer Attorneys of California
FORUM September/October 2026
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