Description
At the beginning of a case, many attorneys will send their clients a "preservation letter" in order to ensure that documents which may need to be disclosed during discovery are preserved in their original format. Your supervising attorney may have a template letter for you to use, or may ask you to assist with drafting such a letter, as information is always changing in terms of the types of information needed to be preserved. For this assignment, edit the attached preservation letter using the track changes feature or by using an alternative font color, so the letter will comply with the rules in your state regarding preservation of evidence and to make the letter easily understood by a client. Then, in a memo to your supervising attorney, Joe Smith, explain why you made the changes you made, and the purpose behind a preservation letter. Be sure to include a discussion about what could happen if documents were destroyed or were not preserved.
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Explanation & Answer
Attached.
Dear ___________:
This will follow up our discussion regarding your preservation obligations for electronic
information relating to your claims against OPPOSING PARTY. As we discussed, we want to
make sure you are fully informed of the obligations imposed by the developing case law and
rules in this area.
Please ensure that you do not alter, dispose, or tamper with any of the material that is admissible
as part of the evidence as these materials will be discoverable as well as admissible in the
litigation. Any act to preserve the evidence in this case will lead to the appeal of spoliation
instruction in the course progress of this litigation regarding the matter.
The standard does not require that the information actually be relevant to the lawsuit or that it
will actually be used in the lawsuit. Rather, the issue here is making sure that information which
may be potentially relevant is not inadvertently destroyed. In this regard, the preservation of the
data is really used to prove a negative (i.e., that no one destroyed damaging information). We
require you to preserve all of the following evidence materials related to the lawsuit;
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You must maintain hard copies of documents as well as all e-mail and other
electronically stored information.
Electronic information includes e-mail, voicemail, word processing documents,
spreadsheet...