§ 2016.070.Application to enforcement of money judgments

Discovery after a judgment already sits in a different world from discovery before one: the case is over, and the only question left is how to collect what is owed. This section keeps the Civil Discovery Act from spilling into that separate world by default. It applies to discovery in aid of enforcing a money judgment only to the extent provided in the judgment-enforcement discovery article found elsewhere in the Code of Civil Procedure's Enforcement of Judgments Law.

In practice, that means a judgment creditor trying to find a debtor's assets does not reach for interrogatories, depositions, and document demands under this title as a matter of course. Those tools come into play in post-judgment enforcement only where the enforcement-of-judgments statutes themselves pull them in, keeping the two discovery regimes, one for litigating a case and one for collecting on a judgment already won, largely separate.