Preservation law was built for a world of paper, where keeping records meant simply not throwing them away. Data does not work that way, and the gap between those two realities is where cost, risk, and disputes now live.

In this episode of Data Xposure, brought to you by Exterro, Andy Hansell, Director Counsel at Target, draws on a career spanning law firm practice, eDiscovery consulting, and in-house leadership. That path gave him fluency in both sides of a discovery dispute: the incentive to drive costs up, and the incentive to keep them down. He explains why preserving legacy systems is far from free, how proportionality applies to preservation and not only to collection and review, and why courts and opposing counsel often assume a database can answer questions it was never built to ask.

Andy also offers a contrarian view of AI in litigation. Rather than a defense-side cost saver, he sees an arms race, plaintiffs have more incentive to adopt AI than defendants do, and the result may be more lawsuits, more sharply targeted. Listeners will come away with a practical view of how to defend preservation decisions, communicate data realities to outside counsel, and think clearly about what AI actually changes.

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