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ARTICLE · 07 MAY 2026

Custodian Interviews: Your First Line Of Defense In Modern eDiscovery

Arnold & Porter
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If your company lands in litigation, chances are that valuable data won’t be sitting neatly in a single email server. It’s scattered across Slack threads, Teams chats, WhatsApp messages, cloud folders, or personal phones...

United StatesLitigation, Mediation & Arbitration
Melissa Weberman
Melissa Weberman
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If your company lands in litigation, chances are that valuable data won’t be sitting neatly in a single email server. It’s scattered across Slack threads, Teams chats, WhatsApp messages, cloud folders, or personal phones — “shadow IT” you never officially approved, or even heard of before. That is why custodian interviews — structured conversations with employees who control relevant data — remain important to a sound discovery strategy. They provide early insight, reduce costs, and help demonstrate good-faith efforts if preservation is later questioned.

Linked below is a recent article I co-authored with Rick Clark from CloudNine, which provides greater detail.

1. Go In With a Plan

Before you speak to anyone, it can be a good idea to map out:

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