HandoutSample Preservation Letter-1438978445486

Sample Preservation Letter
Dear :
By this letter, you and your client are hereby given notice not to destroy, conceal, or alter any paper or
electronic files and other data generated by and/or stored on your client’s computers and storage media
(i.e.., hard drives, floppy disks, backup tapes), or any other electronic data, such as voicemail. As you
know, your client’s failure to comply with this notice can result in severe sanctions being imposed by
the court and potential liability in tort for spoliation of evidence or potential evidence.
Through discovery we expect to obtain from you a number of documents and things, including files
stored on your client’s computers and your client’s computer storage media. As part of our initial
discovery efforts, you will soon receive interrogatories and requests for production of documents and
things.
In order to avoid spoliation, you will need to provide the data requested on the original media. Do not
reuse any media to provide this data.
Although we may bring a motion for an order preserving documents and things from destruction or
alteration, your client’s obligation to preserve documents and things for discovery in this case arises in
law and equity independently from any order on any such motion.
Electronic documents and the storage media on which they reside contain relevant, discoverable
information beyond that which may be found in printed documents. Therefore, even when a paper copy
exists, we seek all documents in their electronic form along with information about those documents
contained on the media. We also seek paper printouts of only those documents that contain unique
information after they were printed out (such as paper documents containing handwriting, signatures,
marginalia, drawings, annotations, highlighting, and redactions) along with any paper documents for
which no corresponding electronic files exit. Our discovery requests will ask for certain data on the hard
disks, floppy disks and backup media used in your client’s computers, some of which data are not
readily available to an ordinary computer user, such as deleted files and file fragments. As you may
know, although a user may erase or delete a file, all that is really erased is a reference to that file in a
table on the hard disk; unless overwritten with new data, a deleted file can be as intact on the disk as any
active file you would see in a directory listing.
Electronic evidence is discoverable. Accordingly, electronic data and storage media that may be subject
to our discovery requests and that your client is obligated to preserve, include but are not limited to the
following:
[Describe files and file types sought]
All digital or analog electronic files, including deleted files and file fragments, stored in machine
readable format on magnetic, optical or other storage media, including the hard drives or floppy disks
used by your client’s computers and their backup media (e.g., other hard drives, backup tapes, floppies,
CD-ROMs, thumb drives, etc.) or otherwise, whether such files have been reduced to paper printouts or
not. More specifically, your client is to preserve all emails, both sent and received, whether internally or
externally, and including all attachments; all word-processed files, including drafts and revisions; all
spreadsheets, including drafts and revisions; all databases; all CAD (computer aided design) files,
including drafts and revisions; all presentation data or slide shows produced by presentation software
(such as Microsoft PowerPoint); all graphs, charts, and other data produced by project management
software (such as Microsoft Project); all data generated by calendaring, task management and personal
information management software (such as Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes); all data created with the
use of personal data assistants (PDAs) (such as Palm Pilots or Pocket PCs); all data created with the use
of document management software; all data created with the use of paper and electronic mail logging
and routing software; all Internet and web-browser generated history files, caches, and “cookie” files
generated at the workstation of each employee, and on any and all backup storage media; any and all
other files generated by users through the use of computers and/or telecommunications, including but
not limited to voicemail. Further, you are to preserve any logs of network use by employees or
otherwise, whether kept in paper or electronic form, and to preserve all copies of your backup tapes and
the software necessary to reconstruct the data on those tapes, so that there can be made a complete, bit-
by-bit “mirror” evidentiary image copy of the storage media of each and every personal computer and/or
workstation and network server in your control and custody, as well as image copies of all hard drives
retained by you and no longer in service, but in use at any time from [insert date] to the present.
Your clients are also not to pack, compress, purge, or otherwise dispose of files and parts of files unless
a true and correct copy of such files is made.
Your clients are also to preserve and not destroy all passwords, decryption procedures (including, if
necessary, the software to decrypt the files); network access codes; ID names, manuals, tutorials,
written instructions, decompression or reconstruction software, and any and all other information and
things necessary to access, view, and (if necessary) reconstruct the electronic data we are requesting
through discovery.
This request also applies to all data, whether in hard copy or electronic, that is created or modified after
your receipt of this letter.
In order to assure that your client’s obligation to preserve documents and things will be met, please
forward a copy of this letter to all persons and entities with custodial responsibility for the items referred
to in this letter.
Sincerely, etc.

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[Describe files and file types sought]

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