During the process of litigation (if a dispute should end up with formal litigation in a civil court or other civil tribunal) copies of relevant files on your computer, tablet, digital camera SDcard, mobile phone, USB stick, email server, cloud storage etc. (known as “electronic documents”) will in due course be stored into a new sets of folders which you have created on your computer for the purpose of the litigation (or into a document management system specifically designed for litigation such as Bundledocs or Litigation Ready).
But this process of scanning/copying/storing in your litigation folders will not happen at once - it will take place over time, as more becomes known about the dispute and you seek legal advice, and it is important, as the very first thing you do once you realise that the matter could result in litigation, or could result in an application to the Land Registry which may or may not end up being referred to a tribunal, is to take steps to preserve all original paper (or card) documents which might possibly be relevant (and also any non-digital photo negatives you may have) and also preserve all electronic documents which might possibly be relevant. This may involve taking backup copies of documents which may be at particular risk of accidental loss or deletion.
Promptly taking steps to preserve original paper documents and electronic documents is important for two reasons:
To avoid any document which may be relevant to any future legal proceedings being routinely or accidentally lost before a copy has been stored in the folders you have created for the litigation.
To ensure that, even after a document has been copied and stored in the litigation folders, the original is still available for inspection if needed. For most stages of litigation, only PDF copies of documents are used, but the originals of documents included in the Final Hearing Bundle used at the final hearing (trial) would normally need to be brought to the hearing in case the judge wishes to look not just at a PDF copy in the Hearing Bundle but at the paper original. Also, depending on the rules and practice of the particular tribunal, there will typically be a Disclosure of Documents process under which each party has an opportunity - whether at the final hearing or before - to physically inspect originals of all disclosed documents. The filenames which you give to the document copies stored in your litigation folders will generally be concise names suitable for use in the litigation including the date and (after "disclosure") the disclosure number, rather than keeping the exact original filenames of electronic documents. Nevertheless it may be necessary sometimes to check the original filenames of electronic documents.
By "paper original" what is meant is what you have originally in your possession - before you make any copies needed for the legal process or for the purpose of obtaining legal advice. So original paper documents include "original originals" such as a conveyance deed where you have the actual "wet ink" signed original, but also include "original copies" - for example when you purchased your property you may have been given a photocopy of an old conveyance, in which case that photocopy which you were given is the original paper document in your possession.
Original electronic documents also need to be preserved. Don't discard the devices which contain photos and other documents. If a device fails, or you buy a replacement for some reason, keep the old device safe. For most purposes in litigation copies of electronic documents are used but If the authenticity of any electronic document is disputed then the other side might ask the tribunal to direct that the actual device on which the document was originally created (e.g. the phone or digital camera SDcard on which a photo was taken) be handed over to a neutral computer expert to investigate (which can be done even if the device is no longer functional as it may still be possible to retrieve, with specialist equipment, data from components inside the device). In practice it is actually quite rare for the authenticity of a document to be disputed: parties may, for example, dispute whether what an email says is true, or what a photo really shows, but to actually dispute that, for example, an email is a genuine email sent on the date it purports to have been, is rare. But in case there should be a dispute you should keep all devices until the end of any litigation.
It is important to make sure that original electronic documents are not accidentally deleted. If you are a private individual check that your email system is not set up to automatically delete emails over a certain age. If it is, you could turn that option off. Turning off automatic deletion of old emails might mean that you have to increase your email storage size, but any additional charge for that would probably be minimal. That approach might not be practical if you are a large organisation and in that case other measures will be necessary to ensure data is preserved.
The routine backups which you have made in the past may be relevant as showing, for example, what the contents of any website you might have were at a particular time in the past. If the dispute you have is, for example, with a customer who has ordered goods or services from you online, the details which were displayed on your website at the time of the order may well be relevant. The contents of webpages generally are liable to change over time even if the particular webpages on your own site have not in fact been changed since the date when the customer used it to order. So the best evidence of what particular webpages on your website contained at the relevant date would be likely to be the last routine backup of the website which you took before the date in question and the first routine backup which you took after the date in question. So it is important to make sure that routine backups are preserved and not lost by reason of backup media being recycled.
As well as documents you have in your possession there may be other possibly relevant documents held by organisations which the organisation routinely stores for a set number of years and then destroys (to save space - in the case of paper documents - and perhaps also - in the case of both paper documents and computer files - because the organisation is concerned not to keep documents containing personal information longer than is necessary under data protection principles). For example, solicitors often keep client files for a set number of years and then destroy them. So as soon as any matter arises which could result in litigation it is worth thinking about whether documents, which could possibly be relevant, might be held by solicitors or other organisations you have used in the past, and then contacting those organisations promptly. For example if the matter which has arisen relates to land you own, the solicitors you used for the conveyancing when you bought that land will have kept a file containing not only a copy of everything the solicitors sent you at the time but also copies of correspondence between your solicitors and the seller's solicitors much of which you will not have been sent at the time (because it concerns details which the solicitors were dealing with for you) but which could possibly be relevant. So even if you have scrupulously kept everything your conveyancing solicitors sent you at the time, there will be further documents. You can ask them to make sure they preserve the originals and, in addition, you can ask them how much (if anything) they would charge to send you PDF copies of paper documents, and copies in some convenient format for any electronic documents they hold. The same applies if you have a mortgage and the mortgage company is keeping title deeds of an unregistered property as security.
When a dispute arises which could potentially end up with litigation, initially you won't know for sure the precise form that any eventual litigation might take. It might be that in the end only part of what now seems to be disputed remains in dispute, and only that part is subject to eventual litigation. Conversely it might be that the dispute is widened so that some additional matter not currently disputed but generally associated with matters disputed, ends up also being part of the legal dispute as well. Because the exact parameters of any eventual legal dispute cannot be precisely predicted at the outset, it is important, for the purposes of ensuring that relevant original documents are preserved, to take steps to preserve everything which could possibly turn out to be relevant.
As well as taking steps to guard against any possibly relevant documents being accidentally deleted or lost it is a good idea (as explained below) to make copies on your main computer of sets of documents which may be at particular risk such as electronic documents on mobile devices. Taking copies is not a substitute for taking care of originals but is an extra precaution.
You should be making regular backups of all your data in any event (e.g. to a portable hard drive) as a general good-IT-practice precaution against device failure or accidental deletion and such backups will preserve a copy of original electronic documents, in their native form including metadata, as they were at the time of the backup.
Whilst the counsel of perfection is to take regular backup copies, to keep for a number of years, of the data on all your devices, including mobile devices such as your phone, some people just backup their main computer or, at least, are more consistent in backing up their main computer. So it is a good idea, whatever else you do, to create backup copies in a folder on your main computer of all sets of electronic documents on all of your mobile devices which could contain relevant documents, so that those backups will be included in the backups regularly taken on your main computer. Usually the storage space used on mobile devices will be very much less than the storage space available on your main computer so you can do a backup of all data on the mobile devices without having to be too selective.
To do this, create a high-level folder on your main computer. You could name the folder e.g., depending what the dispute is about, Copy documents re Right of Way Dispute 2026.
Within that high-level folder, create a second-level folder named General backup of mobile devices and, within that, create a sub-folder for each device from which you are copying files, like this:
John Smith's Galaxy A37 phone
Paul Jones' iPhone 17
To ensure that metadata is preserved when copying to your main computer, first do a ZIP on the mobile device and copy the ZIP into the appropriate sub-folder which you have created on your main computer (see above). If you are doing separate ZIPs for different sets of documents withing a mobile device, give each a distinctive name e.g. JPG Photos.zip. Most phones and tablets have a pre-installed app which can create ZIP archive files. Or you could install the RAR app and use that. In the case of any SDCards, insert them in any convenient device in order to create a ZIP archive.
Note that there are various photo management services which can automatically backup photos from a phone to cloud storage but (perhaps because lossless compression of JPGs is not possible) they may, depending on the options selected, store the JPG data in the cloud in a "lossy" compressed form (by removing pixels) and not preserve metadata in the copies in the cloud. If you have such "lossy" compressed backup copies already, do not rely on them but create archive files direct from the JPGs on the original mobile device.
Some data on mobile devices may not be stored in ordinary files which can readily be ZIPed. An example is messaging Apps. Some messaging apps may store all data in the "cloud" so that, although that data is duplicated on the mobile device for efficiency and speed, it would not be lost if the mobile device was destroyed because you can reconnect to it on any new replacement device. But if there are some Apps on the mobile device which might contain relevant data which is not stored in ordinary files and is not stored in the cloud either - such as SMS messages - you may need to take a screenshot of the messages you have exchanged with each possibly relevant correspondent (by opening the instant message app display on your device, turning the phone to the horizontal position, taking a screenshot, pressing the scroll capture button to scroll through, and capturing one set of related messages at a time). Note that if a text message is quite long, the messaging app might initially just display the first 20 lines, for example, followed by ...Read More. In this case, of course, you need to tap on "Read more" so that the entire message is displayed before doing a screenshot. Save the screenshots into a sub-folder within the appropriate sub-folder which you have created on your main computer (see above).
Depending on what your dispute is about, the contents of websites might be relevant. For example if you have a dispute with a customer who has ordered goods or services from you online you might want to take a copy of the details displayed on your website. The contents of webpages generally are liable to change over time even if the particular webpages on your own site have not in fact been changed since the date when the customer used it to order. So the best evidence of what particular webpages on your website contained at the relevant date would be likely to be the last routine backup which you took of your website pages before the date in question and the first routine backup which you took after the date in question. It is important to make sure that routine backups are preserved and not lost by reason of backup media being recycled and, as an additional precaution you could make copies of the webpage images from the relevant backups and store those copies in a second-level folder (see above). You can use the Print function of the Chrome browser on a Windows computer to make a PDF copy of a webpage as shown in the example here. Save current and, if possible, historical webpages in a sub-folder named e.g. Copies from www.carpenters.co.uk Dec 2025.
It is particularly important to take copies of the relevant webpages if, for some reason, you do not have historical website images captured on backups. Capturing a copy at around the date in question would have been ideal but if you did not do that at the time, at least you can take a copy now.
Depending on the particular litigation procedure and the rules of the particular tribunal concerned, your opponent will at some stage come under a legal obligation to preserve relevant documents they possess but, to be on the safe side, if the contents of your opponent's website are relevant you can yourself take copies at the earliest opportunity. For example if you have a dispute with a supplier from whom you have ordered goods or services online you might want to take a copy of the details displayed on their website. As the contents of webpages are liable to change over time, taking a copy just before and just after you ordered would have been the ideal but, if you didn't do that, taking a copy as soon as you think of it may have at least some value
After you have taken the steps described above you may receive, or acquire, further potentially relevant documents and you should store them safely in a way which documents who sent them to you (or how you acquired them) and when as explained here.
This information page is designed to be used only by clients of John Antell who have entered into an agreement for the provision of legal services. The information in it is necessarily of a general nature and will not be applicable to every case: it is intended to be used only in conjunction with more specific advice to the individual client about the individual case. This information page should not be used by, or relied on, by anyone else.
The information on this page about specific computer techniques is provided for information purposes only. Every reasonable effort has been made to ensure that the information is accurate and up to date at the time it was written but no responsibility for its accuracy, or for any consequences of relying on it, is assumed by me. You should satisfy yourself, before using any of the techniques, software or services described, that the techniques are appropriate for your purposes and that the software or service is reliable.
This page was lasted updated in June 2026. Disclaimer