Need a checklist of tasks to plan for litigation? Here’s a Litigation Response Workflow Checklist from eDiscovery Today you can download!

Earlier this year, I spoke on a terrific panel at ILTACON titled From Reactive to Proactive: Building a Litigation Response Playbook with Ross Dubinsky, Managing Director at Harbor where we guided attendees through creating a proactive litigation response playbook, covering workflows, technology preparation, and cross-functional collaboration.

As a takeaway from that session, Ross and I combined to put together an actual Litigation Response Playbook, comprised of useful forms and checklists that we had available and also that we collected from a variety of contributors, including Craig Ball, Nicole Marie Gill, Minerva26, Elite Discovery and Nextpoint. Those resources included everything from a custodian interview checklist to a data collection questionnaire to a meet and confer Rule 26 preparation checklist to a sample preservation letter to a sample legal hold notice to a deposition prep checklist and more.

One of those checklists was prepared by me for the session – the sample Litigation Response Workflow Checklist. This checklist was prepared by me based on my experience over the years working on eDiscovery projects and the checklists and forms that I’ve used during that time. It was designed to provide a high-level listing of tasks for several phases of litigation, including:

• Implement Litigation Hold Notice
• Form Case Team, Conduct Initial Assessment and Investigation, Develop Strategy
• Conduct Custodian Interviews
• Preserve and Collect ESI and Document Chain of Custody
• Process, Ingest and Cull Data
• Keyword Search Creation, Testing and Application
• Predictive Coding / TAR Process
• Responsive, Privilege, Issue-Coding and QC Review
• Prepare Privilege Log and Produce Responsive Documents
• Deposition and Trial Preparation Activities
• End Case Activities and Post-Mortem

So, it’s actually a collection of mini checklists to support those phases. Each task has a checkbox to enable you to mark the task complete (and eventually the phase overall). Thanks to Shelby Helsel of Hodgson Russ (who coordinated our panel) for making the checkboxes clickable in Adobe Acrobat!

I prepared this sample Litigation Response Workflow Checklist to identify typical tasks associated with each phase of the litigation. Does it include every possible task that you might have to conduct in each of those phases? Probably not, but I did provide three additional lines in each phase for you to add your own tasks that aren’t included.

It’s notable that – especially in larger cases – different people might be completing these tasks. For example, your review team probably won’t be conducting custodian interviews, your operations team won’t be conducting responsiveness and privilege review, and so forth. Most phases are on a different page by themselves so that you can distribute them if needed (or share the entire form online and assign different people to each section of the form).

Chances are, most of you would do this checklist differently. You might organize the phases differently or have different tasks, or word them differently. But hopefully, this form is useful at least to identify tasks that you may need to address in each of these phases. If it identifies at least one task you don’t have on your own checklists, that’s helpful, right? 😉

The ten-page Litigation Response Workflow Checklist is available for download here. Hope you find it useful!

So, what do you think? What checklists do you use for litigation and discovery? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using GPT-4o’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “robot IT professional checking items off a checklist”.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the authors and speakers themselves, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.