Interrogatories are written discovery questions one party sends another, and most jurisdictions require a response to every question — either an answer, a valid objection, or both, since a party can object to part of a question and still answer the rest. Weak or boilerplate objections are increasingly disfavored by courts and can be overruled wholesale, sometimes with sanctions, while well-founded and specifically stated objections are usually sustained.

The core discipline is treating every objection as something you may have to defend in front of a judge on a motion to compel. A one-line objection that just recites 'vague, overbroad, unduly burdensome' with no explanation reads as a placeholder, not a legal argument, and most modern discovery rules and local orders explicitly require more.

Read each question and classify it: relevant and answerable as written, relevant but overbroad in scope or time, seeking privileged or protected material, genuinely vague or ambiguous, or seeking something outside the responding party's possession or knowledge. The category determines which objection actually applies — objecting on the wrong ground is functionally the same as not objecting.

For every objection, state the specific ground and the specific reason it applies to that specific interrogatory. 'Objection: overbroad' says nothing a court can evaluate. 'Objection: this interrogatory seeks all communications since the company's founding in 1987, with no limitation to the relevant three-year period at issue in this dispute' gives a judge something to rule on.

Where a privilege objection is asserted, most rules require enough detail to allow the requesting party to assess the claim without revealing the privileged content itself — this is typically handled through a accompanying privilege log rather than in the objection text.

When an interrogatory is overbroad but contains an answerable core, most practice favors objecting to the overbroad portion and answering the narrower, proper scope — stating clearly what has been withheld and why. Refusing to answer anything at all when a partial answer was available is a common way objections get overruled and invites a motion to compel.

Before serving objections, read them as if you were the judge deciding a motion to compel. If an objection would not survive that read — if it's conclusory, unsupported, or clearly overbroad itself — either narrow it, support it with a real explanation, or drop it and answer instead. Objections that get routinely overruled cost credibility on every later discovery dispute in the case.