§ 1987.2.Award of reasonable expenses and reasonable attorney's fees incurred in making or opposing motion; failure to provide lost, damaged, altered, or overwritten

Subpoena fights over compliance or a motion to quash can be run in good faith or as a tactic, and this section gives courts a tool to discourage the latter. On a motion made under the party/agent notice procedure in Section 1987 or under the quash-and-modify procedure in Section 1987.1, the court can, in its discretion, award reasonable expenses, including attorney's fees, if it finds the motion was made or opposed in bad faith or without substantial justification, or that some requirement of the subpoena was oppressive.

That discretion has a limit built in: absent exceptional circumstances, a court will not sanction a subpoenaed person or that person's attorney for electronically stored information that was lost, damaged, altered, or overwritten through the routine, good-faith operation of an electronic system, though this does not excuse anyone from an existing duty to preserve discoverable information.

The section closes with a mandatory rule for a specific scenario: a motion under Section 1987.1 to quash or modify a California subpoena seeking someone's personally identifying information for use in an out-of-state or foreign case, served on an internet service provider or similar interactive computer service, where the underlying case arises from the moving party's online free-speech activity and the other side cannot make a prima facie showing of a valid claim. If the moving party wins that motion, the court must award reasonable expenses and attorney's fees, not merely as a matter of discretion.