Read enough sanctions orders in a row and the pattern stops looking random. California superior courts are not sanctioning aggressively across the board — they are hitting a narrow set of behaviors hard, while letting the rest of the discovery skirmishing pass with a fee award or nothing at all. Plaintiff PI counsel who walk into a sanctions motion expecting the old monetary-only outcome are increasingly walking out with issue sanctions on causation, evidentiary preclusions that gut a defense, or in the worst cases for the other side, terminating orders.
The shift is partly doctrinal — the California Supreme Court's 2024 decision in City of Los Angeles v. PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP and the Legislature's quick statutory response reset how trial judges frame sanctions authority. But the more useful read for PI practice is behavioral. The orders that bite share recurring fact patterns. Knowing which patterns judges treat as sanctionable, and which they treat as ordinary discovery friction, is the difference between a meaningful motion and a wasted filing.
The Statutory Reset After PwC
For roughly a decade, trial courts had treated Code of Civil Procedure §2023.030 as a freestanding source of sanctions authority — the catch-all that let a judge sanction any "misuse of the discovery process" listed in §2023.010 without tying the order to a specific method statute. The Supreme Court ended that practice in PricewaterhouseCoopers, holding that §§2023.010 and 2023.030 do not themselves authorize sanctions absent a method-specific hook in the deposition, interrogatory, production, or expert-disclosure statutes.
The Legislature's response was fast and pointed. Amendments effective in 2024 restored §2023.030 as independent authority for sanctions against any conduct enumerated in §2023.010. The practical effect for PI counsel is that the briefing burden moved, not the outcome. A well-drafted motion still ties the conduct to a method statute — §2025.450 for deposition non-appearance, §2031.320 for inspection-demand defaults, §2030.290 for interrogatory failures — because trial judges read those as the cleanest path. But you no longer need to choose between a method hook and the §2023.030 menu. You can plead both.
The kill-shot for opposing motions: cite the post-amendment §2023.030 framework, then cite the specific method statute, and let the court pick. Motions that picked just one have been losing on briefing technicalities even when the underlying conduct was egregious.
PMK Unpreparedness Is the Most-Sanctioned Conduct
The single most reliable sanction generator in PI practice right now is the unprepared Person Most Knowledgeable. The fact pattern: defense produces a witness on a §2025.230 notice listing ten or twelve categories, the witness can answer two of them, and counsel position the gap as a memory issue rather than a preparation failure. Trial courts have stopped accepting the framing.
The doctrinal anchor remains Maldonado v. Superior Court — the producing party has an affirmative duty to educate the designee on all noticed topics, including by review of documents and consultation with former employees. What has changed is the remedy. Where five years ago a re-deposition with fee-shifting was standard, recent orders are awarding issue sanctions on the specific PMK categories where the witness was unprepared. In a premises case, that can mean a deemed admission on notice. In a trucking case, it can mean a deemed admission on hours-of-service compliance or vehicle-maintenance scheduling.
The plaintiff-side practice that draws these orders is tight notice drafting. Categories that track the elements of the claim — duty, breach, notice, causation, damages — read to a trial judge as good-faith discovery. Categories that sweep broadly read as fishing, and judges will deny sanctions on the categories the witness reasonably could not have been prepared on. The narrower the notice, the harder the sanctions hit.
ESI Preservation and the Adverse-Inference Instruction
Spoliation orders in PI practice now divide cleanly into two buckets: the negligent-destruction cases that draw evidentiary instructions, and the intentional-destruction cases that draw issue or terminating sanctions. The dividing line is usually whether a litigation hold was issued and whether it was followed.
Telematics data, dashcam footage, body-worn camera files, and surveillance video from commercial premises are the recurring evidence types. The pattern courts hit hardest: the defendant had access to the data, retention policies provided for routine deletion at thirty or sixty days, and counsel either did not issue a hold or issued one that excluded the relevant data type. In those cases, judges have been issuing CACI 204-style adverse-inference instructions as a matter of course, often before trial as part of a sanctions order rather than at the jury-instruction conference.
For plaintiff counsel chasing this remedy, the preservation letter is the foundation. Send it before the defendant has any colorable claim of routine destruction. Identify the data types by name — not "all relevant evidence" but "dashcam files for unit #X, telematics records for the trip dated Y, surveillance video covering camera positions Z." Generic preservation letters get generic responses. Specific ones create the record a judge needs to find willfulness.
Expert Disclosure Gamesmanship Under §2034.300
The expert-exclusion statute is the most powerful sanction in the code because it is mandatory once the predicate is shown, and courts have been applying it strictly. The recurring fact patterns: a late-disclosed retained expert dressed up as a non-retained treating physician with opinions that go well past treatment; a designation that lists an expert by name but omits the case-specific opinion summary required by §2034.260; a refusal to produce expert files in advance of deposition.
Defense counsel have been pushing the boundary on treating-physician designations to avoid the §2034.260 disclosure obligations, particularly on causation and apportionment opinions. When the deposition exposes that the treater formed those opinions for litigation rather than treatment, the §2034.300 motion is the cleanest path. Courts have been granting them. The same pattern works in reverse: a plaintiff treater who attempts to opine on standard of care, future surgery probability, or life expectancy without a retained designation is equally exposed.
The lesson for designation drafting is to over-disclose on treating physicians who will offer anything beyond treatment. The §2034.260 declaration costs nothing to file and forecloses the §2034.300 motion entirely. The same fee-agreement-discipline that §6147 enforcement has imposed on intake is now expected at the expert-designation stage.
Privilege Log Failures and Subject-Matter Waiver
Privilege logs are the quietest sanctions vector in PI practice. The orders rarely make headlines, but they reshape cases. The pattern that draws waiver findings: a defendant withholds a category of documents, produces a privilege log that lists author, recipient, date, and a one-word description ("communication"), and refuses to supplement when challenged.
The case law on this is older than the recent doctrinal shifts — Best Products, Inc. v. Superior Court and its progeny — but trial courts have been applying it more aggressively in cases where the underlying litigation involves insurer or corporate-defendant communications about the incident. In bad-faith adjacent cases, in claims involving corporate-policy documents, and in product-defect adjacent cases that resemble the issues raised in the rideshare non-delegable-duty litigation, courts have been finding subject-matter waiver where the log was demonstrably inadequate.
The plaintiff-side play is a meet-and-confer letter that quotes the log verbatim and identifies, by entry number, why each description fails the specificity requirement. That letter — not the eventual motion — does the work. Defense counsel who receive a specific letter and refuse to supplement create the record a court needs to find willful inadequacy. Defense counsel who receive a generic letter ("your log is insufficient") have an easy meet-and-confer defense.
Practice Notes for the Sanctions Motion
Three patterns separate sanctions motions that get more than fees from those that do not.
Document the pattern, not the incident
Trial courts grant terminating and issue sanctions on a record of repeated misconduct, not a single failure. A motion that documents three discovery failures in chronological order — with the meet-and-confer letters attached — reads as a pattern. A motion that documents one failure, even an egregious one, reads as a dispute. The same is true for evidentiary sanctions on a §2034.300 motion: a single late-disclosed opinion is weaker than a course of designations that consistently understate the expert's anticipated testimony.
Tie the sanction to the prejudice
The strongest motions ask for a specific remedy tied to a specific prejudice. "Issue sanction deeming notice established because the PMK was unprepared on notice and the §998 deadline is in 45 days" is harder to deny than "appropriate sanctions." Courts that grant sanctions want a clean order to sign. Draft the proposed order before drafting the motion.
Watch the §2023.040 declaration
The notice-of-motion requirements for sanctions are unforgiving. The motion must identify the person against whom sanctions are sought, the type of sanction, and the conduct that justifies it — at the notice level, not buried in the moving papers. Motions that name only the party and seek "monetary sanctions" have been denied on procedural grounds even when the underlying conduct would have supported issue or evidentiary relief. Name counsel where appropriate, name the specific sanction, and tie both to the misconduct in the notice itself.
Closing Observation
The sanctions environment in California PI practice has not become more punitive in volume — judges are not granting more motions overall. They are granting more meaningful relief on the motions they do grant, and they are denying procedurally weak motions faster than before. The post-PwC statutory framework gives both sides cleaner authority to brief from, which means the briefing quality is what carries the motion. The discovery abuses that worked five years ago because the sanctions were limited to fees no longer work, because the sanctions are no longer limited to fees. Plan the discovery plan with the eventual sanctions motion in mind, and the sanctions motion will write itself.