LAWMALL
.COM

Gathering Your Evidence

Email This Section to Interested Businesses, Associates, Friends or Relatives

The most important thing to remember about evidence is that starting this moment DO NOT THROW AWAY ANY OF YOUR FILES, DATA PROCESSING RECORDS, PRINTOUTS, EMAILS, DISKETTES, HARD DISKS, OTHER STORAGE MEDIA, or anything that relates to the case. There is a doctrine of "spoliation" that says that a party to a lawsuit who, knowing that the opposing party has need for the evidence, destroys such evidence is disqualified from maintaining the claim, or perhaps is penalized in a lesser way (such as by instruction to the jury limiting the penalty to something related to the destroyed documents).

Gather all of the evidence and keep it available. This is something you must do, and if you plan to sell your business, make arrangements for continued access to the records, and for your retention of the cause of action.

In addition, you might go through your files and put together everything you can about names of manufacturer's employees you have spoken with, copies of their calling cards, notes of meetings or telephone conversations, copies of complaints or other correspondence, files about problem transactions or inquiries about price or complaints about the prices of your competitors, or notes of shopping your competitors or copies of your competitor's advertising, just to name some of the possibilities.

Try to set aside a place for your past records and other things you will need for the lawsuit, and make sure you can get at them. You could put your records in storage boxes, in appropriate order within the box, and properly marked, with records indicating what boxes contains what items, for later use.