If you manage litigation for a company that lives on written policies, you know the move. A slip-and-fall or single-store accident turns into a request for “all policies and procedures,” and suddenly plaintiff’s counsel is treating your entire corporate manual as fair game.
A recent Florida decision, Costco Wholesale Corp. v. Ditmars, No. 3D25-0179 (Fla. 3d DCA Dec. 23, 2025), is a helpful reminder of the limits. Even when a trial judge is unhappy with how a defendant handled discovery, that does not open the door to a full tour of the company’s internal rulebook.
The underlying case was straightforward. A customer said he was hurt at a warehouse club while taking a heavy box off a shelf with help from an employee. The complaint said the store was negligent in how it stocked the product and how it trained employees to handle heavy items.
In discovery, the plaintiff requested policies and procedures for stocking and removing heavy merchandise at that store. That is a normal ask in this kind of case. If you have written rules for moving heavy boxes, you expect to see them in discovery.
Costco responded that it did not have written policies that matched the exact “stocking and removal” language in the request. Later, in depositions, company witnesses acknowledged there were written policies about lifting heavy items.
Plaintiff’s counsel pounced on the gap between the written answer and the testimony and accused Costco of playing games. Motions to compel followed. The trial court ordered Costco to produce documents. Costco then produced the lifting policies.
That should have been the end of it. It wasn’t. The plaintiff still believed Costco was not fully complying, moved for contempt, and argued the company had ignored several court orders. The judge referred the whole mess to a special magistrate.
The magistrate’s recommendation is what drove this case to the appellate court. Instead of keeping the dispute tied to what was actually requested, the magistrate recommended a sweeping sanction: Costco had to produce all non-privileged policies and procedures. Not just safety policies. Not just lifting or stocking policies. Everything. Even policies that everyone agreed had nothing to do with the accident, the store, or the claims in the case.
The trial court adopted that recommendation and ordered Costco to turn over its policies and procedures on that global basis.
At that point, a single-incident negligence case at one store had morphed into a mandate to open Costco’s company-wide policy library. Costco told the court that those materials included confidential business information and trade secrets unrelated to the lawsuit. Once those documents are produced to an adversary, there is no real way to unwind them later.
So Costco went to the Third District Court of Appeal and asked for emergency review. The appellate court agreed and quashed the order.
The court started from a simple place. Appeals courts do not jump into every discovery squabble. If a trial judge makes a routine mistake about what is or is not relevant, that usually gets dealt with at trial and, if necessary, on an appeal after judgment. But there is a line. When a discovery order clearly breaks the basic rules and forces a party to hand over material that is both irrelevant and sensitive, and that harm cannot be undone later, the appellate court will step in.
Here, the problem was not subtle. Florida’s discovery rules tie what has to be produced to the “subject matter” of the case as framed by the pleadings. In this case, the subject matter was narrow: one accident, one store, and allegations about how merchandise was stocked and how employees were trained to handle heavy items. Policies on stocking and lifting at that store fit cleanly within that scope. Policies on unrelated topics across the enterprise did not.
The sanction order did something different. It did not just push the edge of relevance. On its face, it required Costco to produce all non-privileged policies and procedures even if they had nothing to do with the case and did not relate to any claim or defense. It also went beyond what the plaintiff had ever actually requested.
Put in plain English, the order said: “We know some of this has nothing to do with the case. You have to produce it anyway.”
The Third District said no. The court held that a trial judge cannot, even under the banner of sanctions, order a party to produce documents that everyone agrees are outside the scope of the dispute. Relevance is not optional. It is the starting point for discovery.
The plaintiff sought to save the order by arguing that sanctions are distinct and that trial courts have broad discretion to punish discovery misconduct. The appellate court did not disagree that judges have tools. Florida’s rules allow courts to strike pleadings, limit evidence, deem facts established, or, in extreme cases, enter a default judgment or dismiss the case.
What courts cannot do is invent a new kind of punishment that ignores the rest of the rulebook. No sanction in Florida says, in effect, “because you annoyed the court, you now have to open your entire internal policy library, whether or not it relates to this case.” Sanctions do not give a judge license to override the relevance requirement or to compel disclosure of confidential business material that would never be discoverable in the first place.
The court also focused on the real-world harm. Costco argued, and the court accepted, that its policies and procedures include internal information that the company treats as confidential and in some instances as trade secrets. Once those documents are handed over, an everyday appeal after final judgment is not an adequate remedy. You cannot un-see your competitor’s playbook. That is precisely the situation in which appellate courts are willing to act mid-case.
For corporate legal departments, especially those with large policy stacks, there are some clear takeaways from this decision.
The first is that you are still entitled to a relevance fence around discovery. Plaintiffs can and should get the policies that actually bear on the event they pled. That might include local safety rules, lifting protocols, training materials, and related procedures. It does not automatically include every HR policy, every marketing guideline, every internal manual, and every enterprise-wide procedure your company has created, simply because the word “policies” appears in a request.
The second is that sanctions have boundaries. If a court thinks your discovery responses were too narrow or careless, it has plenty of ways to get your attention. It can order you to supplement, award fees, preclude specific arguments, or, in extreme situations, go further. What it cannot do is treat sanctions as a shortcut to sidestep the basic discovery rules.
The third is internal. The conflict at Costco arose from a gap between a narrow written answer and later testimony about the policies that existed. That kind of mismatch is avoidable. In any premises or product case, assume that core safety and training materials tied to the incident are going to be produced. Identify them early. Make sure your written responses and your witnesses are telling the same story about what exists and what does not. If you think a plaintiff is overreading the request, put your position on the record clearly and be prepared to defend it.
Costco Wholesale Corp. v. Ditmars is not a license to stonewall policy discovery. It is a reminder that the scope of that discovery must remain tethered to the case the plaintiff actually filed. For companies that would prefer not to litigate their entire internal governance every time there is an accident at a single location, that is a helpful line in the sand.
Rosenthal Law Group regularly represents Florida businesses in disputes involving litigation involving extensive and complex discovery issue You can reach Rosenthal Law Group at www.rosenthalcounsel.com or by calling (954) 384-9200 to discuss how these issues may affect your dispute.