Decision: hold, or not to hold: insurers must decide whether a litigation hold is a necessary step in the claims process.(Regulatory/Law: Legal Insight)(Zubulake v. UBS Warburg)

Best's Review, July, 2007 by Rutkin, Alan S.

As part of my work with the American Bar Association, I recently received a great question from the manager of the coverage litigation department of an insurance company: Is a claims department required to issue a litigation hold for all coverage denials?

The term "litigation hold" refers to a party's obligation to preserve evidence. This duty always has existed, but it has become a more difficult issue in the computer era because electronically-stored information is inherently fleeting. It is constantly being saved, changed and erased. Electronically-stored information quickly can become unavailable.

The obligation to provide a litigation hold often is drawn from a series of decisions concerning discovery obligations, such as in Zubulake v. UBS...

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