Can You Meet and Confer by Email?
States the rules as of July 2026. This is a practical summary, not legal advice, and AsyncConfer is not a law firm. Rules, local rules and standing orders change — confirm against your court's current requirements before you rely on it.
Honest answer: sometimes, and in several important courts, no.
This is worth getting right, because the assumption that an email exchange satisfies a conferral requirement is one of the more common ways an otherwise sound motion gets denied without reaching the merits.
The federal rules do not define the term
Neither Rule 26(f) nor Rule 37(a)(1) specifies a medium. Rule 37(a)(1) requires a certification that the movant “has in good faith conferred or attempted to confer” with the person failing to make disclosure or discovery. Rule 26(f) requires the parties to “confer.” Neither says how.
That silence is filled by local rules and standing orders, and they are not uniform.
Where a live conversation is required
Several districts define the term expressly, and define it to exclude correspondence. The Northern District of California is the clearest example. Civil Local Rule 1-5(n) provides that “meet and confer” or “confer” means to communicate directly and discuss in good faith the issues required, that such communication may take place by telephone, and that:
The mere sending of a written, electronic, or voice-mail communication, however, does not satisfy a requirement to “meet and confer” or to “confer.” Rather, this requirement can be satisfied only through direct dialogue and discussion — either in a face to face meeting or in a telephone conversation.
Read that carefully. It is not a preference. In a district with a rule like this, an exchange of letters — however thorough, however good-faith — does not discharge the obligation, and a motion resting on it is vulnerable.
The Central District of California reaches the same result by a different route. Its Local Rule 7-3 requires counsel contemplating any motion to confer with opposing counsel in person, by telephone or by video conference at least seven days before filing, and states flatly that “[l]etters and e-mail are insufficient to satisfy the prefiling conference requirements of Local Rule 7-3.” N.D. Cal. defines the term; C.D. Cal. attaches the requirement to motion practice. Either way, writing alone does not do it. See the C.D. Cal. guide.
The Southern District of New York takes yet another approach — Local Civil Rule 37.2 routes discovery disputes through a request for an informal conference rather than a motion, after a good-faith conferral in person or by telephone. See S.D.N.Y. discovery disputes.
Many individual judges impose similar requirements through standing orders, sometimes requiring lead trial counsel specifically to confer. Check three places before you decide: the Federal Rules, your district’s local rules, and your judge’s standing order.
Where writing is enough
Plenty of courts have no such definition, and there a documented written exchange showing a genuine attempt at resolution is ordinarily sufficient — particularly where the other side has not responded at all. Rule 37(a)(1) contemplates this: it covers a party who “attempted to confer,” which necessarily includes attempts the other side ignored.
California state practice is its own regime. Code of Civil Procedure § 2016.040 requires a meet-and-confer declaration stating facts showing “a reasonable and good faith attempt at an informal resolution of each issue presented by the motion” — a standard about the substance and sincerity of the attempt rather than its medium. See the California declaration guide.
The distinction courts actually care about
Beneath the medium question is a substantive one, and it decides more motions than the local rule does: did you genuinely try to resolve it, issue by issue?
Courts reject conferral efforts that were a formality regardless of medium — a single letter demanding compliance by Friday, a call where one side read positions and hung up, a “meet and confer” that never descended to the specific requests in dispute. Courts accept efforts that engaged with each disputed item and narrowed what could be narrowed, and they say so in the order.
Which means the record matters as much as the format. A certification that says “counsel conferred by telephone on June 12” tells the court nothing. One that shows which items were raised, what was proposed, what was accepted and what remained is the difference between a motion the court reaches and one it doesn’t.
How to satisfy both at once
Where a live conference is required, the answer is not to skip it. It is to make it short and substantive:
- Work the issues in writing first. Put a proposal on each disputed item. Get an acceptance, a counter, or a refusal on each one.
- Hold the call the rule requires. It now covers the two items that are genuinely deadlocked instead of thirty that were never really in dispute.
- Certify from the record, not from memory. Your certification describes dated exchanges on identified items — which is what makes it persuasive.
That is the sequence AsyncConfer is built around. Each item of the conferral gets proposed language, a response and a timestamp, and the whole exchange exports as a hash-chained record you can attach to a filing. Where your judge requires a conversation, you still have the conversation — you just have it having already narrowed the dispute, and with a contemporaneous record of everything that got resolved before it.
For the underlying certification standard, see the Rule 37(a)(1) good-faith certification.