- Court
- Court of Appeals of Georgia
- Year
- 2026
- Case
- Bridges v. Gupta
- Citation
- Case No. A26A0095, 2026 Ga. App. LEXIS 205
- Decided
- April 21, 2026
A post-mortem pacemaker analysis that contradicted the plaintiff's theory of cardiac causation was clearly responsive to the defense's broad illustrative-material discovery requests and should have been disclosed; the failure to produce it supports an attorney-fee award under OCGA § 9-15-14(b), though the trial court's particular award was vacated for procedural and calculation defects on remand.
The opinion is a useful reminder that written discovery is not a clerical chore. It is a litigation act with consequences.
The procedural posture matters. The case arose after a defense verdict in a medical-malpractice action against a cardiologist (Dr. Akshay Gupta) and his medical practice (Atlanta Heart Associates, P.C.). After the verdict, plaintiff’s counsel sent a letter announcing the intent to seek a new trial and attached a post-mortem pacemaker report — generated years earlier, after the decedent’s body had been exhumed and the device analyzed by the manufacturer — that had not been produced during discovery. The defense moved for fees under OCGA § 9-11-37(d) and OCGA § 9-15-14(b). The trial court awarded fees under both statutes. The Court of Appeals vacated the award.
The procedural defects were two. The § 9-11-37(d) award was a nullity because, by the time the trial court entered it, nothing remained pending in the trial court but the fee motion itself; the trial court had lost jurisdiction under C & S Industrial Supply Co. v. Proctor & Gamble Paper Products Co., 199 Ga. App. 197 (1991), and Hart v. Redmond Regional Medical Center, 300 Ga. App. 641 (2009). The § 9-15-14(b) award was an unexplained half-of-the-requested-amount; under City of Albany v. Pait, 335 Ga. App. 215, 220(4) (2015), Georgia does not permit lump-sum or unapportioned § 9-15-14(b) awards.
The substantive premise stood. The Court held the post-mortem report “was clearly responsive to one or more discovery requests” and “should have been disclosed.” Plaintiff’s counsel had a duty to supplement under OCGA § 9-11-26(e)(2)(B); see Anglin v. Smith, 346 Ga. App. 456, 461–62(2) (2018). The work-product objection raised at the trial court was abandoned on appeal, and the Court noted in any event that to claim privilege over later-discovered material counsel must disclose the existence of the material and assert the privilege when supplementing. Id. at 462 n.5. On remand the trial court can redo the § 9-15-14(b) calculation properly.
Two takeaways from the opinion are worth carrying forward.
First, discovery relevance is broader than party-favorable relevance. Omni Healthcare, LLC v. Stacy Young Excavation, Inc., 377 Ga. App. 85, 90(3) (2025), restates the rule: in the discovery context, relevance is interpreted “very broadly to encompass anything that is or may become an issue in the litigation.” Presiding Judge McFadden’s concurrence reaches the same point through OCGA § 9-11-26(b)(1) and identifies the recurring producing-side mistake — “analyzing their duty to respond to discovery from the wrong perspective. They analyzed the information sought from the perspective of their own side of the case rather than from the perspective of the party seeking discovery.” A document can be discoverable while harmful to the producing party’s theory.
Second, fee-award procedure has its own discipline. The § 9-11-37(d) jurisdictional limit is real. The § 9-15-14(b) calculation requirement is real. A party seeking fees needs to brief causation, apportionment, and a specific dollar figure tied to specific sanctionable conduct. A trial court order that does not show its work gets vacated.
A longer doctrinal treatment of the underlying problem — the cultural habit of treating written discovery as paperwork rather than testimony — is at Written discovery is testimony.
