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I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | L I T I G A T I O N A N D P R A C T I C E S U P P O R T 6 Case Closure, Best Practices, Part 1 (Litigation) B Y S T E V E N G W O S T D eciding what to do with client data after a matter closes can be challenging. It is better to establish best practices for data retention before receiving data for a matter than to rely on ad hoc determinations after the matter closes. In the context of litigation support, this may require additional care due to the complex systems that use the data. Data may have different retention requirements in a matter. It may exist in multiple formats. It may exist on different storage media. The best practices need to be flexible enough to apply to changing technologies. And they should to ensure that the end-users can effectively do their work while maintaining proper data hygiene. A typical data-workflow in electronic discovery, for example, is to collect documents from the client, load them into a litigation- support application for searching and filtering, review the files captured by filtering, and produce the responsive ones. In that process, the litigation support professionals using the documents may create copies of the originals, metadata and other content is extracted from the documents and stored in databases, and the documents are transformed into different formats. The original documents, copies, transformed files, and extracted data ("data" below) may exist in different locations on different systems. Previously those locations were relatively limited, e.g. file shares, database servers, external media, email servers, and users' local machine; they've grown to include transfer locations such as Box.com, personal devices such as smart phones, and other locations in the cloud. Compounding the situation, the data can be divided into three generic categories in the context of retention: (1) documents in the official client file, (2) data that was received and processed in litigation support tools, e.g. for attorney review, which may include copies as originally received, and (3) copies of that data that are made solely for additional processing, such as re-imaging or custom parsing. Each

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