Not until I became a litigator did I realize what “a stitch in time saves nine” really means. All too often, clients wind up incurring significant legal fees defending avoidable lawsuits. I have handled cases in which simply documenting a conversation could have avoided tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Lawyers are seeing the adage come into play frequently in e-discovery, the process by which parties in litigation discover and exchange electronically stored information. Unfortunately, many companies, while they have heard of e-discovery, are not sure what it means or how it affects them. When these companies are in litigation, they’re content to ask the employee involved to look through his in-box, sent, and deleted items and print out what seems relevant. The employee might even run a few word searches to find relevant information.