Meet and Confer
A pretrial conference where opposing parties confer, often early in litigation, to discuss the scope, preservation, format, and exchange of electronically stored information and resolve discovery issues before involving the court.
Meet and Confer is a required or strongly encouraged conference in which litigating parties meet to plan how discovery will proceed, with a heavy focus on electronically stored information (ESI). Topics typically include the sources and custodians of relevant records, preservation obligations and any litigation hold, the production format (native files, images, or text with metadata), search terms, privilege handling, and the treatment of inaccessible or backup data.
This process matters to recordkeeping because the answers depend directly on how an organization manages its records day to day. A defensible retention schedule, reliable metadata, and a documented file plan let counsel speak credibly about what exists, where it lives, and what can be produced. Poor information governance, by contrast, exposes the organization to spoliation claims and costly disputes.
For example, when one party demands native spreadsheets with intact formulas while the other proposes static images, the meet and confer is where that conflict is negotiated rather than litigated, narrowing issues and reducing the burden of e-discovery.