It appears that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is serious about cutting back on the collateral order doctrine. Now embodied in Pa. R.A.P. 313, the collateral order doctrine allows the immediate interlocutory appeal of disputes over judicial orders, usually but not exclusively involving discovery, that are: separable from the merits of the case itself, “too important to be denied review,” and would be “irreparably lost” if not immediately reviewed, Rule 313(a); see Bell v. Beneficial Consumer Discount, 348 A.2d 734, 734 (Pa. 1975).

For many years, Pennsylvania courts had been more liberal in their application of the collateral order doctrine than had been their counterparts in the federal judiciary, as in Commonwealth v. Harris, 32 A.3d 243, 249 (Pa. 2011) (adopting categorical approach to collateral order doctrine, contrary to federal practice). In Dougherty v. Heller, 138 A.3d 611 (Pa. 2016), this difference in application began to close. Dougherty was a defamation action brought by the business manager of a politically active labor union against a newspaper reporter. The collateral issue raised on appeal in Dougherty was a dispute over the conditions under which the plaintiff’s deposition would be videotaped. The plaintiff demanded ironclad guarantees against public release of the videotape by the defendant newspaper, and the defendant refused to give them.  The objections had a sandbagging element to them, as they were only raised at the deposition itself and not made during the extended prior period while the deposition had been scheduled.