All speeches or presentations related to HERO or the Petition prepared by, delivered by, revised by, or approved by you or in your possession.

source: http://www.adfmedia.org/files/WoodfillCityQuashPrelimResponse.pdf

The Houston Chronicle reported that the pastors “are closely tied to the activists” who filed the suit.

I think this is why critics are condemning the subpoena. The city is intimidating churches who are not party to the lawsuit.

The very practical problem is that in the U.S. system you can’t just serve a document request that says in its entirety “Category One: All non-privileged documents in your possession actually relevant to the claims and defenses in this lawsuit, except for the ones I already have and where it’s not relevant for me to be able to establish that you had them in your possession.” That is, oddly enough, considered too vague. So in order to get to that endpoint you typically have to either start with a limited number of sweeping and overbroad categories (which will lead to complaints) or a much larger number (so that nothing falls between the cracks) of more precisely targeted categories, which will also lead to complaints. And frankly when one is on the receiving side one is sometimes tactically happy for an overbroad demand, because it means you can bury the limited number of unfortunate/problematic documents your client was foolish enough to generate in a truckload of irrelevant and benign crap the other side was foolish enough to ask for. Heck, sometimes you really want your document request to be “the 10 documents your most senior officer who will have to testify would most like not to have to explain under oath.”

It would be pretty hilarious for the pastors here to say “I’ll be more than happy to give the city’s lawyers audio recordings of every single sermon I’ve preached over the last year, as long as they promise to listen to them all from start to finish. I’m always looking for opportunities to spread the Good Word to folks in need of redemption.”

I agree that the context that it is churches that are suing the city is missing.

At the same time, the other context that is missing is that churches / pastors that were subpoenaed are not the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.