Being served is disorienting, and the instinct is either to respond immediately or to put the papers in a drawer. Both are expensive. The first seventy-two hours should be spent on a small number of concrete steps, most of which are administrative rather than legal.
Preserve documents immediately
Issue a litigation hold in writing to everyone who might hold relevant material, including messaging apps and personal devices used for work. Suspend automatic deletion policies. Document destruction after notice of a claim — even routine, automated destruction — is treated far more seriously than the underlying dispute in most forums.
Diarise the deadline, then work back from it
Note the response deadline and the mode of service. Confirm whether service was validly effected, because defective service is worth knowing about early and worth nothing once you have engaged on the merits. Then build a working timetable backwards, leaving a real margin for the review of a draft response.
Stop discussing the matter
- No direct contact with the claimant or their representatives.
- No internal email threads speculating about liability — those are discoverable.
- No public or social media commentary of any kind.
- Route all questions through a single named person internally.
Notify your insurers
Most liability policies require notification within a defined period and treat late notification as a ground to decline cover. Notify even where you believe the claim is unfounded, and even where you have not decided whether to claim under the policy.
Assemble the chronology yourself
Before instructing counsel, put together a dated chronology of events with the underlying documents attached. Clients consistently underestimate how much this saves. It is the single most useful thing a client can produce, and it is work only the client can do properly.
One thing not to do: send a detailed rebuttal letter to the other side before your position has been assessed. It commits you to an account of the facts before you have read all your own documents.
