Employee turnover is a given. It’s never easy, and depending on your business structure and who the employee is, and it can be very tough for an organization.

Exit interviews for departing employees are a general part of the process at most companies, and yours needs to include understanding that employee’s ESI.

Employees produce virtually all information electronically, and when he or she leaves, it’s imperative for the business to know where that information lives so they can leverage it going forward.

Many businesses are utilizing shared platforms for storing information, but many also still allow local storage. Most IT departments wipe and redeploy computers internally when an employee leaves, meaning that you could lose all of the information that employee managed.

Then there’s that pesky litigation hold requirement that says you have to know when an employee is leaving, and you have to make sure to keep their information in case it’s needed for a matter.  Preservation is an obligation that falls to both in-house and outside counsel, and despite the new rule changes requiring bad faith for spoliation (going into effect in 2015), you don’t want a spoliation issue to cloud the merits of your case. Not all press is good press in litigation.

So the question is — do you have a process in place where IT, legal and the business work together to make sure IT is notified of legal holds so hard drives aren’t wiped, email accounts aren’t deleted, and other ESI is preserved? Even if your business is small, and your process is having IT call before a computer is wiped, you need a process.

Get one.  Find the right person in IT to talk to about it.  Let them know it’s a business requirement.  It’s low cost to implement, and it’s the cheapest insurance you can buy.

In my experience, the key is to sit down with the right people and talk through how the process would physically work.  Then you need to anticipate the issues with the process you outline. I’ve witnessed issues where the process involves a paralegal sending an email to an IT employee updating a legal hold list, and the IT employee is then supposed to add a tag to a database flagging those new custodians as legal holds. The snafu comes when the IT employee neglects to add the tag because other things came up, and a hard drive is not preserved.  DOH. (Homer Simpson style slap.)

Eliminate that potential — have the paralegal update the list.  Yes, that means giving her access to a database.  Pull a Nike and JUST DO IT.  Or work around the issues.  Think creatively.  New issues require creative, new solutions.

These are the types of details you’ll have to work out in that process.  But you’ll be glad you did.

There’s nothing worse than that moment when you realize that the key custodian for a matter you’ve known about for a year left the company three months ago and her hard drive was wiped and repurposed. Trust me, you want to avoid that feeling. And the expense that follows when you get a motion for sanctions and you have to fight it.  What if you lose?  Either way, it’s a no-win.

Preservation efforts are never going to be perfect.  And they don’t have to be — your obligation is to take “reasonable efforts” to preserve information.  Having a process related to capturing departing employees’ ESI is part of those “reasonable efforts.”

Stop procrastinating and do it.  Make it your 2015 resolution.

Do Better Discovery.