Often when a business is served with a third-party subpoena, the reaction is either annoyance, dread, or anger.\u00a0 What are your options?\u00a0 How can you protect your business from getting dragged into litigation that you seemingly have nothing to do with?\u00a0 This blog addresses how to approach responding to a third-party subpoena that requests production of documents.<\/p>\n
Your first step should be to contact a trusted attorney.\u00a0 Counsel can guide your company in formulating a timely response to the subpoena, assert appropriate objections, and\/or recommend filing a motion to quash\/protective order, if appropriate.\u00a0 Counsel can also analyze the subpoena requests to assess the risk of exposing your business to potential litigation.<\/p>\n
The next step in this process is to notify any individual that is in \u201cpossession, custody, or control\u201d of documents potentially responsive to the requests.\u00a0 Such documents could be in the custody of outside attorneys, consultants, accountants, general counsel, corporate officers, executives, and\/or affiliated companies.\u00a0 You may have your attorney contact counsel for the party issuing the subpoena to see if an agreement regarding the scope of production can be reached.\u00a0 However, failure to comply with a third-party subpoena is not an option.\u00a0 If you do not comply, you may be found in contempt of court.<\/p>\n
In addition, a \u201clitigation hold\u201d or \u201clegal hold\u201d should immediately be put into place.\u00a0 A \u201clegal hold\u201d is a written document that notifies and directs employees to preserve any responsive documents or other information.\u00a0 This includes written documents, electronically stored information, videos, recordings, etc.\u00a0 The gathering of documents can be voluminous, so you must make sure that all potential custodians search and preserve responsive documents or information.\u00a0 Failure to collect and preserve responsive documents or information can expose you to certain penalties.<\/p>\n
Once you have collected the documents they must be reviewed for responsiveness, privilege, and confidentiality.\u00a0 As noted above, counsel will be instrumental in this revision.<\/p>\n
Responding to a subpoena can be an onerous and complicated task that presents dangerous pitfalls.\u00a0 Care must be taken to ensure compliance while also protecting the responding party\u2019s interests.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Often when a business is served with a third-party subpoena, the reaction is either annoyance, dread, or anger.\u00a0 What are your options?\u00a0 How can you protect your business from getting dragged into litigation that you seemingly have nothing to do with?\u00a0 This…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[86],"class_list":["post-175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-law","tag-third-party-suboena"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apslaw.com\/its-your-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apslaw.com\/its-your-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apslaw.com\/its-your-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apslaw.com\/its-your-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apslaw.com\/its-your-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.apslaw.com\/its-your-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apslaw.com\/its-your-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apslaw.com\/its-your-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apslaw.com\/its-your-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}