Extract from Barry Schwartz’s article “The Best Way to Conduct a Custodian Interview”
Conducting Interviews for Data Identification
Custodian interviews, as recently reported in Legaltech News, are an important and valuable resource, particularly useful to ferret out additional locations of electronically stored information (ESI). See the case cited in the article, Small v. University Medical Center (2:13-cv-0298-APG-PAL, July 13, 2018). The court, in its decision, enumerated many ESI deficiencies. As Philip Favro noted in the article, the court observed that the preservation deficiencies were due “in large part from its [defendant’s] failure to conduct effective interviews.”
At BIA, we realize that custodian interviews are a key part of the process of data identification, but they, in and of themselves, are done at a huge cost, both in client personnel time and in the time and costs incurred by counsel performing them.
