What do you do if you get evidence that can be used in litigation? Basically, everything you’re doing could be used litigation. So, this certainly applies to everything. Your report, your interviews, your notes, your communications with your client. You need to assume everything can be used in litigation. But, if you get a thing or a nugget that is really likely to be used in the investigation, you probably need to, if it’s a physical thing, you need to start tracking the chain of evidence for it.
And there are forms out there, and you just track when you got it and document the condition it’s in, where and how you stored it, who had the keys to that storage facility, and where and how you passed it on and the condition it was in when you passed it on. Because, you don’t want your treatment of the thing, the set of keys, or whatever it is, to be a distraction in the litigation. Frankly, you don’t want to be in the litigation at all. And so, you need to do as much as you can to document in a timely way, things that might come into evidence so that you can just hand them over to litigation counsel.
