THE SITUATION

About 6 months ago, during about a 1 week period, a number of customers called into the Bricker Beverage ("BBev") 1-800 number and sent in comments through the virtual assistants on BBev's website and the company's Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram accounts complaining of becoming ill after drinking BBev's beverages. Dana Bricker, the general counsel, asked you to do an internal investigation and you determined that the complaints all had similar concerns (severe stomach issues, in cases requiring hospitalization for dehydration) but were spread throughout all beverage lines. Approximately 90% of all cases occurred in the Southeast region (AL, FL, GA, MS, NC, SC, TN).

Last month, BBev received a complaint from the law firm Ambul, Ans, & Chase indicating that a class action against BBev had been filed in U.S. federal court in Mississippi. The plaintiff's lawyer demanded by letter that BBev preserve and produce all documents relevant to the complaints and to the manufacture, distribution, marketing and testing of all beverages sold by BBev, including but not limited to all customer complaints, use of robotics in the manufacturing process, quality control results, ingredients changes, distribution changes, and handling of expired product.

There are 1,200 employees at BBev. The headquarters office in Midtown Manhattan and corporate campus in Phoenix, AZ, as well as the 5 regional manufacturing and distribution centers, have site-to-site VPN connectivity and make use of a centralized data center. BBev performs nightly backups of all network drives and email servers in the data center. These backups are rotated or expired weekly. The locations communicate internally via Skype. The 3 specialty manufacturing centers operate independent networks, each with its own backup systems; they have not been integrated with the other corporate locations. According to company policy, email is retained in the Exchange servers for 90 days and email older than 90 days is to be purged from the Exchange servers. In addition, there is a storage room in the Southeast specialty manufacturing center that contains approximately 500 tapes of legacy production systems belonging to prior owners of the specialty manufacturing center. The specialty manufacturing centers do not have an email management program. Further, it has become apparent through interviews of various employees that many in the company have used Gmail and Dropbox to share information with one another.

Sophia Bricker has advised you that all costs related to discovery of information for the case will come from your budget. BBev's outside lawyers have objected to plaintiff's requests, but fear that the court will be inclined to allow them. Question: Where relevant information may be stored (what systems, devices, applications, physical locations)

1. Who may have relevant information
2. Accessibility/inaccessibility of any legacy data
3. Document management and information technology policies, procedures, and/or practices that potentially affect preservation
4. Distribution of legal hold; legal hold instructions and training
5. Methods to be used to preserve (and collect as warranted) the needed data
6. Any need for a protective order to protect data privacy or trade secret information
7. The cost implications (very generally) of compliance with whatever plan is chosen
8. Discovery needed from the plaintiffs and non-parties, including needed topics and likely locations where data may reside.
9. References, as needed, to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 1, 26(b)(1), 26(b)(2)(c), 26(c), and 34(a) and Zubulake.