Information asymmetry is pervasive in litigation before discovery levels the playing field: a defendant typically knows more about its own internal decision-making and documents than the plaintiff does at the time of filing, while a plaintiff often knows more about the personal impact of an injury than the defendant does. Discovery exists specifically to reduce this imbalance by compelling disclosure of documents and testimony each side would not otherwise share.

Persistent information asymmetry shapes settlement behavior even after formal discovery closes, because parties rarely achieve perfect mutual knowledge of each other's case strength, litigation budget, or true settlement floor. This is part of why settlement negotiation resembles a game of imperfect information rather than a simple calculation both sides could solve identically if they had the same facts.

Juricratic models litigation explicitly as an imperfect-information game rather than assuming both sides share the same view of the facts, and it uses Bayesian updating to show how each new piece of discovered evidence should rationally shift a party's own beliefs, and how it may shift the other side's beliefs as well, narrowing the informational gap step by step rather than all at once.

Litigators use discovery strategically to close specific information asymmetries that matter most to case value, prioritizing depositions and document requests aimed at the facts most likely to change either side's settlement calculus, rather than pursuing discovery broadly without regard to which gaps actually drive outcome uncertainty.