What Does "Meet and Confer" Actually Require?
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.
“Meet and confer” is one phrase covering several different obligations, which is why the answer to “what does it require” is always “in which court, and for what?”
It is worth separating them, because the requirements are not the same and the consequences of getting them wrong differ.
The three situations
1. The case-opening conference. In federal court, Rule 26(f) requires the parties to confer early in the case to consider claims and defenses, discuss settlement possibilities, arrange initial disclosures, address preservation of evidence and develop a discovery plan. It is a scheduled, substantive meeting that produces a written report. See the Rule 26(f) conference checklist.
2. Before a discovery motion. Rule 37(a)(1) requires a motion to compel to include a certification that the movant conferred or attempted to confer in good faith to obtain the discovery without court action; Rule 26(c)(1) imposes a parallel requirement for protective orders. California requires a meet-and-confer declaration under Code of Civil Procedure § 2016.040 for its principal discovery motions. This is a precondition to relief — fail it and the motion can be denied without the merits being reached.
3. Before other motions, by local rule or standing order. Many districts and individual judges require conferral before a variety of motions. These are creatures of local practice and vary widely.
What the obligation has in common
Across all three, courts are asking the same underlying question: did the parties genuinely try to resolve this themselves?
That means:
- Specificity. Conferral is about identified items — this request, this interrogatory, this category of the statement. A general demand that the other side comply is not conferral.
- Reciprocity. An effort to resolve implies a willingness to move. Courts notice which side proposed a compromise and which side only restated its position.
- A real opportunity to respond. A deadline of two days, or a letter sent after the motion was drafted, will be read for what it is.
- Persistence proportionate to the dispute. One unanswered letter is ordinarily not enough where the other side is engaged; it may well be enough where they have gone silent, which Rule 37(a)(1) contemplates by covering a party who “attempted to confer.”
Where courts differ: the medium
This is the trap. Some courts define conferral to require a live conversation and say expressly that correspondence does not suffice — the Northern District of California’s Civil Local Rule 1-5(n) is the clearest example. Others have no such definition, and a documented written exchange is ordinarily enough.
Never assume. Check the Federal Rules, your district’s local rules, and your judge’s standing order — all three. This is covered in detail in can you meet and confer by email.
What it produces
The conferral is not the deliverable. Depending on the situation you end up with:
- a written Rule 26(f) report and discovery plan filed with the court;
- a joint case management statement, where the district requires one, which is often considerably longer than the discovery plan — see N.D. Cal.; or
- a certification or declaration describing the effort, attached to a motion.
All three are documents about what the parties said to each other. Which is why the record of the conferral, not just the fact of it, is what ends up mattering.
The practical problem
The obligation is easy to state and awkward to discharge. Scheduling a conference between two busy litigators takes a week. The conference itself covers thirty items, most uncontroversial. Afterwards, one side writes up what was agreed, from memory, and the other side does not entirely agree with the write-up. What remains disputed is unclear until someone drafts the motion.
Handling the conferral in writing, item by item, changes the shape of that: each item carries a proposal, a response and a timestamp, so the agreed text and the genuine deadlocks are separated as you go rather than reconstructed at the end. Where your court requires a live conversation, you still hold it — with the list already narrowed to what actually needs discussing.
That is what AsyncConfer is for: a workspace where both sides draft, counter and compile the statement section by section, and where the conferral record exports as a timestamped, hash-chained document you can attach to a filing.