Litigation Response Plan

Every Corporation Needs a Litigation Response Plan

Why does almost every corporation have a disaster recovery plan but few have a Litigation Response Plan?  Well, litigation is a disaster! However, you can be proactive. With a Litigation Response Plan in place, the return on investment is huge.

Metal gears on blue background as indicators of a litigation response plan established for litigation to run smoothly.

It’s no secret that litigation costs are out of control. Corporations are managing greater amounts of data every day, while the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure have shorter production deadlines. Consequently, this leads to 24 by 7 crisis management of the people and the workflow of litigation. In fact, rushing to rationalize data and find key evidence leads to a greater number of errors occur.

Not Having a Plan is Risky

Here are just a few examples where the court sanctioned companies and their lawyers, assessed attorney’s fees, and costs.

  • See Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC
  • $8. 5 Million – Qualcomm II: Qualcomm Inc. v. Broadcom Corp.
  • $2. 75 Million – United States v. Philip Morris USA Inc.
  • $1 Million – In re Prudential Insurance Co. of America 

The moral of the story – form a Litigation Response Plan! They are also known as a Litigation Preparedness Plan or Litigation Readiness Plan. With a Litigation Response Plan in place, we can identify the following at your company: the Electronic Discovery Team, the litigation history, the computer systems and what we call the data universe, the people and the workflow involved in the day‑to-day aspects of litigation, and the e-discovery strategies that you want to use in your cases.

In the long run, a Litigation Response Plan lowers the cost of outside vendors, counsel, and internal resources, while also allowing efficient, low-stress, electronic discovery. Immediately, you will reduce the data population to review and find the critical files and email to settle cases faster. In turn, this will reduce costs and get those files closed. Additionally, it substantially reduces many risks such as improper preservation or spoliation, searching live systems or indefensible collection practices, or a chain of custody problems, inadvertently disclosing confidential corporate data, the discovery of relevant data too late, or reprocessing data, which leads to much more costs and delays.

Litigation Response Plan from Your Expert

We can also help by serving as your party’s expert, a joint (neutral) expert, or special master.