Counsel for the Preserving Party: Running Federal Litigation Holds and Handling Lost Data Before Sanctions Motions

Clinton P. Sanko, Office Managing Shareholder (Chattanooga) and Practice Enhancement & eDiscovery Officer | Baker Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, PC

Clinton Sanko is the Office Managing Shareholder of Baker Donelson’s Chattanooga office and the Firm’s Practice Enhancement and eDiscovery Officer, the position responsible for the technology, process, and staffing that support eDiscovery and document review across one of the largest law firms in the Southeast. He is a seasoned commercial trial lawyer with substantial experience in high-stakes, complex commercial litigation  including multidistrict antitrust class actions, trade-secret disputes, and technology-driven contract litigation  and he has spent nearly two decades teaching judges, litigators, and in-house counsel how to preserve, find, and use electronically stored information. He champions an efficiency-through-proportionality model that pairs analytics with disciplined workflows to control cost without sacrificing defensibility, and his leadership is built around a single mandate: that relevant data is preserved, collected, reviewed, and produced on time, within budget, and in a form that supports the merits.

• Education & Credentials

Mr. Sanko earned his J.D., magna cum laude, from The Pennsylvania State University Dickinson School of Law and his B.A., cum laude with honors in History, from Grove City College. He is admitted to practice in Tennessee and Pennsylvania and before the U.S. District Courts for the Middle and Eastern Districts of Tennessee and the Western District of Pennsylvania. He is AV Preeminent Peer Review Rated by Martindale-Hubbell and is a Tennessee Supreme Court Rule 31 Listed General Civil Mediator.

• Recognition & Leadership

Mr. Sanko is listed in The Best Lawyers in America for Commercial Litigation (2027), was named to MidSouth Super Lawyers (2016  2018) and Mid-South Rising Stars (2013  2014), and is a three-time recipient of the JD Supra Readers’ Choice Award as a Top Author in eDiscovery (2018, 2021, 2022). City Scope Magazine recognized him in “The Gold Club 2018” as one of 30 influential business leaders in Chattanooga. Within Baker Donelson he serves on the Technology Steering Committee and, since 2024, has led the Chattanooga office as its managing shareholder. Courts and co-defendants have turned to him for discovery leadership as well: he has been appointed as a special master in a trade-secret dispute and has led Joint Defense Group discovery committees in class actions.

• Professional Involvement

Mr. Sanko is one of the most frequently invited eDiscovery faculty in the region and has presented on preservation, legal holds, and ESI case law before the Georgetown Law Advanced eDiscovery Institute (“Judge’s Tank: Rethinking the Rules,” 2025), The Sedona Conference (“ESI Case Law: Ethics, Discovery Process, Preservation, and Search,” 2024), the University of Florida Law E-Discovery Conference (2025 and 2026), Legalweek New York 2026, the 75th Judicial Conference of the Sixth Circuit, the Tennessee Judicial Conference, and the Louisiana State Bar Association. His recent programs include “AI-Generated ESI in Litigation: Preservation, Legal Holds, Privilege, and Discoverability” (BARBRI, 2026) and “eDiscovery Meets the Merits: Preserving, Finding and Using Electronic Information” (Midwest Labor and Employment Law Seminar). He co-authored “Every Litigator Needs to Use and Understand GenAI” for the ABA’s The SciTech Lawyer (Winter 2026), has published on litigation risk in cybersecurity outsourcing, AI-enabled services, and AI-driven trade-secret theft in the Daily Report and elsewhere, and co-authored the ABA Section of Litigation’s “Advice for Young Litigators: Engage with IT People.” He is a member of DRI, the Federal Bar Association, the Tennessee and Chattanooga Bar Associations, and the Chattanooga Technology Council; previously served as Vice Chairperson of the ABA Young Lawyers Division’s Dispute Resolution Section; and has taught “Digital Investigation of Crimes” at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

• Experience

Mr. Sanko’s trial practice centers on employee-mobility and technology disputes, including labor-antitrust litigation, trade-secret misappropriation, and non-competition covenants. He has defended a client in two large multidistrict antitrust class actions alleging wage and compensation fixing affecting thousands of employees, and in trade-secret matters he routinely works among forensic specialists, in-house IT, and client legal teams to identify, preserve, and marshal the key electronic evidence that builds  or defeats  the claim. He also handles technology-related contract litigation, minority-shareholder rights cases, condemnation, and other commercial matters. As the Firm’s eDiscovery Officer, he oversees the people, platforms, and protocols that govern preservation, collection, review, and production firm-wide, insisting on clear protocols and quality controls among experienced lawyers, project managers, document reviewers, and technologists. He also advises clients on the accelerating role of artificial intelligence in litigation strategy  from early risk assessment through search, review, and fact development  while remaining mindful of privacy, privilege, and accuracy risks. Having both built a firm’s preservation infrastructure and tried the cases in which the data mattered, he is uniquely positioned to walk counsel through issuing and running a defensible federal litigation hold and getting ahead of lost data before it becomes the subject of a sanctions motion.

Alexandria Hartill, Attorney, eDiscovery Group | Baker Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, PC

Alexandria Hartill is an attorney in Baker Donelson’s Nashville office and a member of the Firm’s eDiscovery Group, which is dedicated to delivering comprehensive, compliant, and cost-effective eDiscovery solutions through strategic resource allocation and responsible technology use. Her practice concentrates on the design, implementation, and continuous optimization of defensible discovery-lifecycle workflows, and she counsels corporate clients on the information-governance questions that sit at the front end of every dispute: enterprise-wide legal-hold implementation and compliance, the negotiation of sophisticated ESI protocols, and the calibration of proportional discovery scopes in civil and regulatory matters. She personally manages data preservation, collection, processing, and production for trial teams, and she is known for managing expectations across those teams with clarity and precision so that compliance is innate to every engagement rather than an afterthought.

• Education & Credentials

Ms. Hartill earned her J.D. from the University of Tennessee College of Law, where she served as Candidacy Process Editor of the Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy and received the Law Student for Justice award from the Tennessee Supreme Court (2015). She earned her B.A., magna cum laude, from North Carolina State University. She is admitted to practice in Tennessee and North Carolina.

• Recognition & Leadership

Ms. Hartill has been named to Best Lawyers: Ones to Watch in America for Commercial Litigation for six consecutive years (2021  2026). She is a leader in the American Bar Association’s Science and Technology Law Section, where she serves as Chair of the Internet of Things Subcommittee (2026  2027), and she coauthored “Every Litigator Needs to Use and Understand GenAI” for the Section’s flagship publication, The SciTech Lawyer (Winter 2026: Responsible Use of AI). She has been invited faculty on the practical use of AI and analytics in discovery for the Tennessee Defense Lawyers Association and Kentucky Defense Counsel Joint Annual Meeting (“Latest Updates in AI Technology and Law Firms,” 2025) and for Baker Donelson’s firm-wide CLE program “Litigation & Transaction Unlocked: AI Transforming the Legal Profession” (2025).

• Professional Involvement

Ms. Hartill is an active member of the ABA Science and Technology Law Section and the Nashville Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Division. In practice, she frequently serves as the central liaison among case teams, technology vendors, and large reviewer populations, translating substantive legal objectives into granular review instructions and iterative quality-control metrics that deliver accuracy, consistency, and cost predictability. Before joining Baker Donelson she served as a mediator for the State of Tennessee Bureau of Workers’ Compensation, and during law school she served as a legal intern for the Knox County Department of Children’s Services and the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation.

• Experience

Before joining Baker Donelson, Ms. Hartill served as Discovery Counsel and Project Manager at a national law firm, where she developed the complex commercial litigation and government-investigation experience that now informs her end-to-end discovery strategies. Her representative work includes designing privilege-review playbooks, creating dynamic privilege logs, and piloting continuous active learning and AI-assisted review workflows that integrate technology and privilege-screening models to streamline data culling and reduce review hours. On the preservation side, she implements and audits enterprise-wide legal holds, negotiates ESI protocols, scopes proportional collections, and manages preservation, collection, processing, and production from upstream ingestion through downstream review and fact management, then supports trial teams through deposition and exhibit preparation so that discovered material aligns seamlessly with trial strategy. Her hands-on command of how holds are actually issued, tracked, and enforced inside large organizations  and of what goes wrong when they are not  makes her an ideal guide for counsel who must defend the preserving party’s conduct when data has been lost.

SESSION 1 – Running a Federal Litigation Hold From Trigger Date to Documented Custodian Follow-Up | Clinton P. Sanko & Alexandria Hartill | 12:00pm – 1:00pm

This session teaches federal civil litigators who represent the preserving party, plaintiff or defendant, how to run a litigation hold from the dated trigger memo through documented custodian follow-up. The hour covers the same-day systems call, a custodian script built on the September 2026 Concurrent Ventures and AFGE v. Trump orders, and a preservation log drafted to survive production. The session draws on what the speakers have done themselves: the words that got custodians to admit deletion habits and timer changes, holds at clients without IT staff, and a log and memo that opposing counsel later read.

BREAK | 1:00pm – 1:10pm

SESSION 2 – When a Client’s Lost Data Surfaces Mid-Case: The Preserving Party’s First Thirty Days | Clinton P. Sanko & Alexandria Hartill | 1:10pm – 2:10pm

This one-hour federal civil litigation session is taught from the seat of counsel for the preserving party, plaintiff or defendant, and covers the first thirty days after a client’s ESI loss surfaces mid-case. It covers stopping and scoping the loss, the replacement search, privilege positions on hold communications after Concurrent Ventures, correcting counsel’s own certification, the disclosure letter and cure offer, and the custodian-by-custodian record that AFGE v. Trump shows. The hour depends on what only a lawyer who has made the disclosure call can supply: the first client question, the correction wording, and what the judge did with the record.