Reported / Citable
Background
Aziz Damak, a self-represented (pro se) hotel receptionist, sued his former employer — the Khannas, who operated the Cozy Inn motel in Costa Mesa — for wage theft, missed meal and rest breaks, and wrongful termination after he cooperated with a federal labor investigation. In mid-2024, Damak served comprehensive written discovery on all defendants. After 35 days and multiple follow-up calls and emails, he had received nothing — not a single response or even an acknowledgment from defendants’ attorney, Hitendra Bhakta. Over the next several months, the silence continued. Damak eventually filed fifteen separate motions to compel in late 2024, seeking both orders requiring compliance and monetary sanctions of at least $1,000.
In May 2025, the trial court granted every motion to compel on the merits but denied all monetary sanctions. The court’s reasoning: the applicable statutes (sections 2030.290, 2031.300, and 2033.280) make monetary sanctions mandatory but tie the amount to “reasonable expenses actually incurred” by the moving party. Because Damak was self-represented, had a fee waiver, and had not paid attorney fees, the court concluded he had incurred no expenses — and so there was nothing to award.
Damak petitioned the Fourth District for a writ of mandate challenging the sanction denial. Defendants did not file an informal response when invited to do so, and their formal return was only two and a half pages long. The Court of Appeal issued the writ.
The Court’s Holding
The Fourth District held that the trial court correctly applied the “actually incurred” framework from section 2023.030 and well-established authority (going back to the Supreme Court’s Trope v. Katz and Musaelian v. Adams decisions) to conclude that a self-represented non-attorney cannot recover sanctions for the time and effort spent on discovery motions, because no attorney fees or equivalent expenses were actually “incurred.” That part of the ruling stood.
But the court found a critical error: the trial court had entirely overlooked Code of Civil Procedure section 2023.050. That statute — enacted in 2019 and amended to raise the sanction amount to $1,000 effective January 1, 2024 — operates “notwithstanding any other law” and imposes a mandatory $1,000 sanction, payable to the requesting party, whenever a court finds that a party or attorney (1) failed to respond in good faith to a document production request, or (2) failed to confer in good faith about the request. The sanction is tied entirely to the wrongdoer’s conduct, not to what the other side spent. Because the trial court never addressed section 2023.050, and because nothing in the record showed any good-faith response or conferral by defendants, the denial of sanctions was an abuse of discretion. The court directed the trial court on remand to consider whether the section 2023.050 findings could be made and, if so, impose the mandatory sanction.
The court also included a pointed civility discussion, noting that Bhakta’s ten-plus months of complete silence — no emails, no phone calls, nothing — fell “far short of conducting oneself with dignity, courtesy, and integrity,” in violation of the duty California attorneys took on in their admission oath and must now reaffirm annually. The court also noted that Bhakta made a statement at oral argument that appeared flatly contradicted by the record, and reminded him of his duty of candor to the court.
Key Takeaways
- Code of Civil Procedure section 2023.050 is a separate, freestanding sanction provision — it operates “notwithstanding any other law” and imposes a mandatory $1,000 penalty for bad-faith document production conduct, regardless of whether the requesting party incurred any expenses. Trial courts must consider it whenever a document production sanction request is made.
- Under the older general sanction provision (section 2023.030), a self-represented non-attorney can still recover out-of-pocket expenses actually incurred (e.g., filing fees, photocopying, court reporter costs), but cannot recover for the value of their own time or lost opportunity costs.
- The section 2023.050 sanction can be directed against a party, an attorney, or both — and if imposed on an attorney, the court may order the attorney to report it to the State Bar within 30 days.
- Lawyers who completely ignore opposing parties’ discovery — particularly self-represented litigants — face mandatory sanctions under section 2023.050 even if the other side has no attorney fee expenses. The statute was specifically designed to deter stonewalling regardless of the other party’s out-of-pocket costs.
- California attorneys must now annually reaffirm their civility oath (“dignity, courtesy, and integrity”), and courts are increasingly willing to call out violations of that obligation in published decisions.
Why It Matters
This decision fills a gap that California courts have acknowledged for more than two decades: under the traditional discovery sanctions framework, a self-represented litigant facing deliberate obstruction by opposing counsel had almost no monetary recourse — the only available sanctions were for out-of-pocket costs, which in modern paperless litigation are often zero. Section 2023.050, enacted in 2019 and raised to $1,000 in 2024, now provides a deterrent-focused sanction that does not depend on the other side having spent money to enforce their rights. This case is the first published decision to analyze the interplay between section 2023.050 and the older “expenses incurred” framework in the context of a self-represented party.
For California civil practitioners, the lesson is clear: when opposing a self-represented party (or any party), complete silence on discovery is no longer a cost-free strategy. A failure to respond in good faith or to confer about document requests now triggers a mandatory $1,000 sanction per instance under section 2023.050 — on top of any compensatory sanctions that might otherwise apply. The decision also signals that courts are paying close attention to attorney conduct toward pro se litigants, and that the annual civility oath is not empty ceremony.