§ 2030.250.Signatures; oath; officers or agents; responses with objections

This section allocates who has to put their name, under oath, on a response to interrogatories, and what happens depending on who signs. As a default rule, the party who was asked the questions signs the response under oath, confirming personally that the answers given are true. That default gives way only where the entire response consists of objections and nothing else, since there is nothing factual to verify in a response that answers no substantive question at all.

Where the responding party is not an individual, a corporation, partnership, association, or government agency, someone still has to sign under oath on that entity's behalf, and the statute assigns that job to one of the entity's officers or agents. Subdivision (b) then addresses a specific wrinkle: if the officer or agent who signs happens to be an attorney acting in that capacity for the entity, the entity waives its lawyer-client privilege and any work-product protection over one narrow category of later discovery, questions probing the identity of the sources behind the information in the response. That waiver is deliberately narrow; it reaches who supplied the information, not the substance of privileged communications generally. Finally, subdivision (c) makes the attorney, not the client, responsible for signing any response that includes an objection, since objections are legal positions the attorney is asserting on the client's behalf.