Organize an operational response to a dispute: identify when records may need preservation, scope a written legal hold, and suspend relevant deletion systems. Track counsel, costs, privilege, and settlement considerations with legal counsel guiding strategy.
Handles a dispute from the first sign of it — recognizing when preservation obligations attach, issuing and scoping a legal hold, suspending automatic deletion across every system that holds relevant material, preserving privilege, managing outside counsel and cost, and evaluating settlement against the real cost of continuing. Use this to respond to a claim or demand letter, issue a hold, work out which systems the hold has to reach, or decide whether to fight.
Run score Not tested
See how to installReview the instructions the agent will receive before you install.
The decisions that determine how a dispute goes are made in the first week, usually by people who do not know a dispute has started.
This structures the operational response. Procedural obligations and their deadlines vary by jurisdiction and forum — get counsel engaged early, and let them drive strategy.
The obligation to preserve begins when litigation is reasonably anticipated — which can be a demand letter, a threat made in a meeting, a regulator's inquiry, or an internal complaint serious enough that a claim is foreseeable. It does not wait for a filing.
Destruction after that point is treated far more seriously than the underlying dispute. Routine automatic deletion continuing through a hold is the common version, and "it was our normal policy" is not the defense people assume.
A hold has two halves and organizations routinely do only the first.
The systems half is where holds fail, because the notice goes out and everyone assumes it was sufficient. Keep a list of every system with an automatic deletion schedule so that the question is answerable in an afternoon rather than a fortnight.
Re-notify periodically, add custodians as the matter develops, and cover departures — an employee leaving under a hold means their mailbox, files and device do not follow the standard offboarding path. Release the hold in writing when counsel says so, and only then.
Privilege protects legal advice, not facts and not business decisions dressed as legal ones. Copying a lawyer onto a business discussion does not make it privileged; forwarding privileged advice widely inside the organization can waive it.
Where an investigation is being run for the purpose of legal advice, structure it that way from the start — directed by counsel, marked, and circulated narrowly. Retrofitting privilege afterward generally fails.
Agree scope, staffing, rates and a budget with checkpoints before work starts, and require early written assessment of the realistic range of outcomes. Discovery is usually the largest cost and the most controllable one — narrowing custodians and date ranges early matters more than any hourly rate negotiation.
Compare the realistic range of outcomes, weighted, against the full cost of continuing: fees, management time, disruption, disclosure risk, and the effect on other matters. Management time is the cost most consistently omitted and is often the largest.
Consider what a settlement signals to other potential claimants, and get releases that are broad enough to actually end it.
references/sources.md in this skill lists the outside authorities that settle the questions
here — what each one is authoritative for, and what you may do with it. Check them before
answering on anything they cover, and cite what you used. Most are free to read and not free
to reproduce; the use note on each is binding.
No reviews yet. Tell others what you thought.
No login needed. Share how it worked for you, ask a question, or note where it did not run.
No comments yet. Be the first to write one.
Design and review access so people and services have appropriate permissions. Use it to plan roles, audit accounts, reduce always-on admin rights, manage credentials, handle departures, and improve sign-in with single sign-on or multi-factor authentication.
Plan account-based marketing for a defined set of companies. Assess whether the economics fit, prioritize accounts, map the people involved in buying, coordinate outreach across sales and marketing, and track account movement through the pipeline.
Improve the path from signup to a new user’s first meaningful result. Define the action that signals real value, refine signup and onboarding, and diagnose where people drop off so more accounts become active users sooner.
Design a repository’s multi-agent structure by assigning exclusive file areas, defining builder and reviewer roles, and checking ownership rules with a CI script. Use it to divide work, prevent overlapping edits, and decide whether another agent is needed.
Use this skill to define an AI system’s intended use, evaluate its errors across user groups, plan monitoring and meaningful human review, and document its limits. It supports deployment and retirement decisions, especially when AI could affect consequential outcomes for people.
Use this skill to analyze markets, map competitors, assess trends, and compare strategic options such as market entry or build versus buy. It produces a cited research brief that separates established facts from inferences and estimates, states confidence, and connects findings to a decision.