Hyperlink History, What Are Your Responsibilities?

Hyperlinked documents are a great way to share documents, as they allow documents to exist in a single, secure location where they can be shared and updated together, as well as preventing the needless storage of documents in your E-Mails.  On a daily basis, these hyperlinked documents are a real benefit to your organization, but if you are locked in a legal controversy, the benefit of hyperlinked documents disappears,pears and you are faced with uncertainty as to what your true obligations are. 

United Ass’n v. Carvana and Hyperlinked Evidence 

United Ass’n Nat’l Pension Fund v. Carvana Co., No. CV-22-02126-PHX-MTL (D. Ariz. Aug. 21, 2025), addresses the question as to what duty do organizations have to maintain versions of documents which are provided as hyperlinked attachments.  In this case, Carvana used the Google Suite for their document creation and storage, allowing individuals to send documents to various parties.  In discussions with the plaintiffs, individuals at Carvana sent hyperlinked documents, which over time were potentially changed.  The plaintiffs’ requested these documents and Carvana’s defense was that these documents were modified and no longer likely to be identified, with the deployment of additional tools to identify the documents.  

The court was not convinced by this argument, stating “The Court will not excuse Defendants from any efforts to produce contemporaneous hyperlinked documents outright simply because they elected to use a suite of cloud-based web applications that would make that process difficult.”  The defendants were required to work with plaintiffs to collect any possible documents that might exist from two custodians in this matter to complete the collections.   

Productivity vs. Preservation 

In this way, hyperlinked documents are a double-edged sword.  Their productivity gains are real, but if you are not enabling versioning of your documents, you are running the risk of not having critical evidence available.  A hyperlinked document is a live file, which unlike actual attachment to an E-Mail, can be modified or updated, even with the best of intentions in mind. Given these concerns, hyperlinked documents aren’t a problem you can solve only at collection. Even with strong hyperlink identification during collection, organizations need an upstream plan to preserve and keep these files available to avoid negative inferences and spoliation claims.