Taking Advantage Of New Safe Harbor Against Discovery Sanctions

As your company wrestles with how to manage the virtual mountains of electronically stored information (ESI) that are created in today's workplace, you may continue to wonder what steps to take to preserve information when litigation is looming. Newly adopted amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure offer a safe harbor against sanctions for failing to adequately preserve this data. You no longer have to fear that an innocent misstep or a lack of sufficient information in the preservation process could lead to case-ending or financially prohibitive sanctions.

Rather, the changes to Rule 37(e), which went into effect December 1, 2015, provide a much stronger platform from which you can make sound — and more educated — business decisions regarding how to proceed with reasonable ESI preservation functions, without pressure from the unpredictable fear of sanctions.