The Civil procedure Rules of Court in New Brunswick promote the early resolution of claims by mandating pre-Trial discovery of firstly, documentary disclosure and secondly, discovery of parties.

Documentary disclosure occurs via the mandatory production by each party of an Affidavit of Documents, (or 'AOD'), which lists all relevant documents to be disclosed, as well as a schedule of relevant documents that a party refuses to produce on the basis of privilege or other legal basis. A party may serve a Notice Requiring Affidavit of Documents on any another party to the proceeding, which then obliges the answering party to file and serve within 10 days an AOD to the requesting party. The Rule is slightly different for Simplified Procedure proceedings where, following the close of pleadings, the parties to an action must serve an AOD within 30 days on all other parties.

All AODs must reflect all of the documents which are relevant to the issues in the action, and the affidavit must include a signed certification by the lawyer for the party confirming that the lawyer is not aware of any document not disclosed in the AOD, which should have been disclosed. It is worthy to note that the disclosure of documents does not imply that such documents will automatically be admissible in Court. A party receiving an AOD is entitled to receive only copies of the non-privileged documents referred to therein.

Once the documents are exchanged, any party is entitled to an Examination for Discovery of an opposite party, the examination is conducted under oath. This is similar to the deposition or discovery process elsewhere in Canada and the USA; however, only the parties to an action are examined. There is no automatic right to examine (depose), experts or non-party witnesses, without an order of the Court. However, a party is entitled to examine an opposing party and obtain answers/details concerning the findings, opinions and conclusions of any expert consulted by the party being examined.

In the discovery process, each party is usually examined/questioned verbally by the opposite party's lawyer for the purpose of "discovering" all of the facts and evidence the adverse party (ies), has in its possession and which are not otherwise contained in the documents. The parties may also question on the documents themselves. There is an option to conduct a discovery by written questions and answers, but this avenue of discovery is used sparingly in practice. Additionally, if a party may be examined by more than one (adverse) party, the Rules of Court require that there be only one examination and the adverse parties may question the deponent one after the other.