Advantage CLE: Litigation Holds: Best Practices

Defensible preservation and litigation hold practices are critical to ensure accessibility and management of relevant data when there are administrative, governmental, or legal proceedings pending or anticipated, and avoid consequences such as the questioning of the integrity of data sources or worse, potential sanctions for spoliation. To properly implement and manage a litigation hold, businesses must act quickly, communicate with custodians clearly, and take steps to ensure that relevant hard-copy information, electronically stored information (ESI), and other data sources are preserved in a timely manner. In this CLE, we discuss: i) best practices for implementing litigation holds (pre and post litigation), including the contents of the litigation hold; ii) modification of litigation holds, including inflection points that would require a re-assessment of the initial litigation hold; and iii) release of the litigation hold.