Draft Interrogatories

Skill: Draft First Set of Interrogatories to Defendant in a Trade Secret Misappropriation Case

1. Subject-matter triage

• Confirm the governing forum rule on interrogatories, including the count limit and how subparts are treated.
• Read the complaint, TRO/preliminary-injunction materials if any, preservation notices, and early discovery to isolate the claimed trade secrets, accused persons, and accused uses.
• Separate requests aimed at core facts from contention questions that ask for the basis of denials, affirmative defenses, or alternative explanations.
• Identify any confidentiality orders, ESI protocols, and privilege protections before drafting so the interrogatories ask for facts, not privileged communications.

2. Failure modes the skill is correcting

• Drafting without a definitions and instructions section, leaving key terms open to objection and inconsistent interpretation.
• Asking broad, untethered questions that do not track the elements of trade secret ownership, secrecy, reasonable measures, access, acquisition, use, and damages.
• Overloading single interrogatories with too many embedded topics, making the request vulnerable to a subpart objection.
• Missing the people, systems, dates, and mechanisms that connect access to alleged use.
• Ignoring departures, onboarding, offboarding, confidentiality obligations, and device or account controls that often explain how information was obtained.
• Posing contention interrogatories too early or too vaguely, so the response avoids the real defense position.
• Drafting questions that seek legal advice, attorney mental impressions, or privileged strategy rather than discoverable facts.
• Failing to make the interrogatories usable as a written product that can stand on its own in final form.

3. Legal frameworks / domain conventions that apply

• Use the applicable civil-procedure rule on interrogatories, including the numerical limit and the inclusion of discrete subparts.
• Draft with the understanding that interrogatories must be answered separately, fully, and in writing under oath by the responding party, subject to objections stated with specificity.
• Account for the duty to supplement if a response becomes materially incomplete or incorrect.
• Treat contention interrogatories as permissible, but recognize that a court may defer them until discovery is more developed.
• In a trade secret case, frame requests around the information needed to identify the trade secret, the persons with access, the measures used to keep it confidential, the manner of acquisition, any downstream use or disclosure, and the competitive context.
• Align the drafting with the elements and defenses implicated by the governing trade secret statute, applicable civil-procedure rules, and any protective-order regime in place.
• Avoid requests that call for privileged attorney-client communications or attorney work product; ask for underlying facts instead.

4. Analytical scaffolds

• Start from the pleadings and any early evidentiary materials to build a topic map of what must be proven and what must be disproven.
• List the categories of interrogatories before drafting:
  1. corporate identity and relevant operations,
  2. custodians, employees, and other persons with access,
  3. confidentiality measures and information-handling controls,
  4. acquisition, copying, transfer, retention, and disclosure events,
  5. post-separation conduct and competitive use,
  6. agreements, policies, and acknowledgments,
  7. damages-related facts and identified customers, products, or projects,
  8. defenses and alternative explanations.
• For each topic, identify the narrowest factual ask that will force a useful answer without multiplying subparts.
• Use definitions for terms that recur: Documents, Communication, Person, Identify, Describe, Relate to or Refer to, Trade Secret, Confidential Information, and any case-specific technical term.
• Add instructions that require answers based on reasonably available information within the respondent’s possession, custody, or control, and that require partial answers where full knowledge is unavailable.
• Track the running count of interrogatories and count each discrete subpart as a separate request when the governing rule so requires.
• Prefer clean, singular questions over compound phrasing; if a topic needs multiple facts, split it into multiple numbered interrogatories.

5. Vertical / structural / temporal relationships

• Structure the set from general to specific: company background, then actors, then access, then conduct, then use, then defenses.
• Within each topic, move from static facts to time-bound facts and then to consequences or current status.
• Tie each date range to a clear event sequence: onboarding, access period, departure, post-departure conduct, and present retention or use.
• When the same person or system appears across topics, keep the references consistent so the responses can be cross-mapped later.
• Use the chronology to reveal gaps: who had access before departure, what changed after departure, what was transferred, and what is still retained.
• If multiple products, projects, locations, or business units are implicated, separate them so the response does not blur distinct conduct into one answer.

6. Output structure conventions

• Use a conventional discovery-document format with caption, definitions, instructions, numbered interrogatories, and signature/verification or service language as appropriate for the jurisdiction and filing practice.
• Make the definitions practical, not verbose; define only terms that will actually recur.
• Keep instructions targeted to answer format, supplementation, scope of knowledge, and objection handling.
• Draft interrogatories so each one can be answered without needing the reader to infer hidden qualifiers.
• Organize the numbered interrogatories by subject matter and maintain a clean internal sequence.
• Include contention interrogatories near the end unless the case posture suggests they should be reserved or limited.
• Before finalizing, check that the written set is internally consistent, uses the same defined terms throughout, and reads as an operative discovery paper rather than a narrative summary.
• Confirm the final deliverable is the requested interrogatory set in final-file form, not an outline or memo.