Rule 33.Interrogatories to Parties

Rule 33 is Indiana’s written-interrogatory rule: one party sends written questions to another, and that party has to answer them in writing, under oath. Section A sets who can serve interrogatories on whom and when. Any party can serve them on any other party without asking the court first — on a plaintiff, once the case has started, and on any other party as soon as that party is served with the summons and complaint. If the party receiving the interrogatories is an organization, including a government entity, or a partnership, an officer or agent answers on its behalf, drawing on whatever information the organization has available, not just personal knowledge.

Section B controls the format and, as of a 2026 amendment, bars a common shortcut: the vague, catch-all objection. The party sending interrogatories has to leave room after each one for an answer or objection, and the interrogatory itself has to sit right above whichever response follows it, so the two stay paired rather than scattered across separate documents. Each interrogatory gets answered separately and fully, in writing, under oath — unless it draws an objection, in which case the reasons have to be spelled out instead of an answer. The person answering signs the answers; the attorney raising an objection signs that. A “general objection” — one that does not target a specific interrogatory, does not spell out its actual grounds, or gets applied across the board — is not allowed and carries no legal weight, which means a party cannot rely on boilerplate language to avoid answering.

Section C sets the response clock and a narrower one for format complaints. The responding party must serve answers and objections within whatever period the interrogatories specify, as long as that period is not shorter than thirty days from service, unless the court sets a different deadline. If the interrogatories fall short of the format rules in section B, the responding party can object by returning them to the sender — but only within seven days of receiving them; miss that window, and the format objection is gone. Whenever a dispute remains over an objection or an unanswered interrogatory, the party who sent the interrogatories can ask the court to step in under Rule 37(A).

Section D marks the outer edges of what interrogatories can reach and how they have to be written. They can probe anything discoverable under Rule 26(B), and — also as of the 2026 amendment — must be stated with reasonable particularity rather than left open-ended or vague. An interrogatory that calls for an opinion, a contention, or a legal conclusion is not automatically objectionable just because of that; the court can instead push the answer to a later point, until designated discovery wraps up, or until a pretrial conference.

Section E gives a responding party an alternative to writing out an answer by hand: if the answer sits in the responding party’s business records — including something a records review, audit, or inspection would reveal — and pulling the answer from those records would take about the same effort for either side, the responding party can point to the specific records instead of answering directly. That option comes with strings attached: the response has to describe the records precisely enough that the party asking the questions can locate the answer as easily as the party who holds the records could, and the responding party has to give real access to examine, copy, and compile from them.

Two things set Indiana’s interrogatory practice apart from the federal rule. Trial Rule 33 does not cap the number of interrogatories a party may serve, while the federal rule defaults to twenty-five, subparts included, absent a stipulation or court order. And the ban on general objections, along with the reasonable-particularity requirement in section D, are recent additions, effective January 1, 2026 — a sign Indiana has moved to cut down on boilerplate discovery responses.