Employees and system administrators who are responsible for data deemed relevant to litigation must be notified of their obligations, and they must respond specifically and affirmatively when notified.

For some companies, even when an appropriate process is in place, the task of tracking notification and response on legal holds can be daunting. "For large companies, there [may be] a couple of thousand cases open at any one time," PSS's Paknad says. If that is the case, the math is terrifying: A company sending one legal-hold notification and three reminders to each of 50 data custodians would have to send 200 outbound notices for each instance. Multiply that, very conservatively, by 100 cases, and you've got 40,000 notices and responses crisscrossing on the network. And all this is merely in preparation for the pretrial conference.

There are additional changes that impact IT directly. For instance, the FRCP and the attached notes from the court recommend that at least one IT person should file a discovery deposition. "It has to be somebody that knows how the IT systems work," Sills Cummis Epstein & Gross' Dickey says. "Companies need to know, [beforehand] who is the spokesman, and that person should be deposed under oath."

A deposition from IT is certainly the smartest and safest way to go, adds Zantaz's Lambert, especially compared with the IT technician making an in-person appearance at the pretrial conference. "You don't want him in there, because it is two lawyers and a judge, and you don't want the IT person saying the wrong thing," he says.

2 and 3.Rule 26 (a) (1) [B] and Rule 26 (b) (2) [B]: Disclosure