You get a subpoena on a Friday afternoon. Half the team is already gone. You're the only lawyer online.
The return date gives you about ten business days. In that time, you have to pull documents scattered across four systems and two former employees.
And your company isn't even a party to the lawsuit. It's a third-party subpoena. But it still carries a court's name, and a deadline that doesn't care about your weekend.
Breathe. Then move, in order.
This is also the kind of fire drill legal AI now exists to handle: reading a dense filing fast, flagging every deadline, and drafting a first pass so you can focus on the calls only a lawyer can make.
Here's how to respond to a subpoena, in order: read it the day it arrives, calendar every deadline before you touch anything else, identify the type and how broad the demand is, preserve the documents right away, and then decide whether to comply, negotiate the scope down, object, or move to quash.
Get those first moves right in the first 48 hours, and you avoid a contempt motion. The substance comes later. The triage comes now.
Key Takeaways
A document subpoena carries two deadlines: written objections are due before the earlier of the compliance date or 14 days after service (Fed. R. Civ. P. 45(d)(2)(B)), and production is due on the return date.
The duty to preserve attaches the day the subpoena arrives, before any fight about scope. The written litigation hold goes out the same day.
Non-parties hold real leverage: when a court orders compliance over objection, it must protect a non-party from significant expense (Rule 45(d)(2)(B)(ii)).
Ignoring a subpoena risks contempt under Rule 45(g); comply, object, or move to quash before the deadline.
Triage in-house first and hand outside counsel a defined question. GC AI customers report 14% lower outside counsel spend (December 2025 ROI study of 100+ customers).
GC AI is the enterprise-grade legal AI platform built for in-house counsel by Cecilia Ziniti, a three-time General Counsel (Anki, Bloomtech, Replit) who designed it for exactly this kind of triage. Drop the subpoena in. GC AI reads it, surfaces the return date and every interim deadline, and maps the document categories being demanded. It drafts a first-pass objection letter you can edit. A lean legal team responds on time instead of scrambling at midnight.
The First 48 Hours at a Glance
Read the entire subpoena the day it lands, and calendar the return date and the objection deadline as two separate clocks.
Identify the type (documents, testimony, or both) and the forum (civil litigation, grand jury, or regulatory).
Send a written litigation hold and suspend auto-deletion the same day.
Pull the contracts that cover the documents in scope and send any compelled-disclosure notices your confidentiality clauses require.
Call the issuing attorney to negotiate the scope, and confirm any agreement in writing.
Serve written objections or move to quash before the deadline, generally the earlier of the compliance date or 14 days after service.
Run privilege review, log what you withhold, and produce in the required format, on time.
Each step gets its own section below.
Do Not Ignore It. Read It and Calendar Every Deadline
A subpoena is a court order. The word itself is a warning: Latin, sub poena, "under penalty." The first move is to read the whole thing and put every date somewhere more than one person can see. Treating it like a vendor email you will get to next week is how companies end up sanctioned.
Two clocks start the day you are served. A document subpoena gives you a production date, and it also starts a separate clock on objections. Under the Federal Rules, written objections to a document subpoena are generally due before the earlier of two dates: the time specified for compliance, or 14 days after the subpoena is served (Fed. R. Civ. P. 45(d)(2)(B)). Miss that window and you can waive arguments you needed, including privilege and undue burden. State rules and the issuing court's local rules set their own timing. Confirm the exact deadlines against the rules that govern your subpoena.
Calendar the return date, the objection deadline, any meet-and-confer requirement, and a buffer a few days ahead of each so you are not filing at 11:59 p.m. Note who served it, when, and how, because service defects can matter later.
Read the whole document the day it arrives, then calendar every deadline before you do anything else.
Figure Out What Kind of Subpoena It Is
Subpoenas come in three forms. The form you're holding shapes every move that follows. Sort it into the right bucket first.
Subpoena duces tecum (documents): Commands your company to produce documents, records, or electronically stored information. This is the most common subpoena an in-house team sees, and a subpoena duces tecum response turns on scope, privilege, and format.
Testimonial subpoena (ad testificandum): Commands a person to appear and testify, often at a deposition. If it names your company, you may need to designate a corporate representative to testify on specified topics.
Combined: Many subpoenas demand both documents and testimony. Track each obligation on its own timeline.
The forum matters as much as the format. A civil subpoena in private litigation gives you the most room to negotiate and object. A grand jury subpoena or a regulatory demand from the SEC, DOJ, a state attorney general, or another agency is a different animal: it carries higher stakes, tighter limits on what you can refuse, and a real risk that anything you produce has consequences beyond the case in front of you. When the subpoena comes from a grand jury or an agency, slow down and get the right people in the room before you respond.
Identify the type and the forum first, because a grand jury or regulatory demand is a different animal than a civil document request.
Trigger a Litigation Hold and Preserve Immediately
The duty to preserve evidence attaches the moment you reasonably anticipate litigation. A subpoena removes any doubt. Before you argue about scope, before you object, you preserve. Spoliation, the loss or destruction of relevant evidence, can sink your company even when the underlying response was reasonable. The sanctions framework for lost electronically stored information lives in Rule 37(e), and courts use it.
Issue a litigation hold right away. A defensible hold identifies the custodians likely to hold responsive material and names the systems and accounts in play (email, shared drives, Slack, ticketing tools, texts on company devices). It also suspends the auto-delete and retention policies that would erase relevant data, and goes out in writing so you can show a court exactly what you did and when. Loop in IT the same day to halt automatic deletion. If former employees are custodians, flag that early, because their data is often the first thing to disappear.
Preservation is broader than production. You hold everything potentially relevant even while you work to narrow what you produce.
Send a written litigation hold and suspend auto-deletion the same day the subpoena arrives.
Meet and Confer to Narrow the Scope
Most subpoenas ask for more than the requesting party needs and more than you should hand over. The fastest path to a manageable response is a phone call.
Reach out to the issuing attorney and talk through the demand. The lawyer who drafted it went broad because going broad cost them nothing at the drafting stage. Many overbroad subpoenas shrink fast once you propose reasonable limits: a tighter date range, a defined set of custodians, agreed search terms, specific document types in place of "all documents relating to." A cooperative meet-and-confer also builds the record you want if you do end up in front of a judge. Courts expect parties to try to resolve scope disputes before motion practice. A reasonable counterproposal in writing shows good faith.
Get any agreement to narrow the scope confirmed in writing, then work to that scope.
Call the issuing attorney early and negotiate the scope down in writing before you litigate it.
Valid Objections and When to Move to Quash
When negotiation does not get you there, you have formal options. Written objections preserve your positions; a motion to quash or for a protective order asks the court to step in. Common grounds for a company served with a subpoena include:
Overbreadth and relevance: The demand sweeps in material with no real connection to the case.
Undue burden: The cost, time, and disruption of compliance outweigh the requesting party's need, a particular concern for non-parties.
Privilege: Attorney-client privileged material and attorney work product are protected. You withhold them and log them.
Privacy and confidentiality: Trade secrets, employee personal data, and third-party confidential information may warrant a protective order that lets you produce under restrictions.
Procedural and service defects: Improper service, an unreasonable return date, or geographic limits on where compliance can be commanded.
You move to quash when an objection alone will not protect you: when compliance would force disclosure of privileged or genuinely sensitive material, or when the subpoena is so overbroad or burdensome that narrowing it is unrealistic. The Federal Rules require a "timely motion" to quash (Fed. R. Civ. P. 45(d)(3)), so this decision lives in those first two weeks. Confirm the timing against the rules that govern your subpoena.
Before you commit to a ground, check the controlling standard. Inside GC AI, you can research the relevant opinions in plain English with US Case Law, GC AI's case-law research covering 13 million+ US court opinions. Scope the question to your jurisdiction. Every citation links to the full opinion, so you can verify the standard a court will apply before you object or comply.
Serve written objections to preserve every ground, and move to quash when an objection alone cannot protect privileged or genuinely burdensome material.
Producing Documents the Right Way
If you are producing, do it carefully. A sloppy production can waive privilege or hand over more than you meant to.
There is one production step lean teams skip under deadline pressure: your own contracts. Most confidentiality clauses require prompt notice to the counterparty before you disclose their information under legal compulsion. A data protection agreement can set its own conditions for producing personal data too. Pull the agreements that cover the documents in scope. Send the compelled-disclosure notices early, and document that you sent them.
Run a privilege review before anything goes out the door. Build a privilege log for what you withhold. Apply redactions for privileged and confidential content. Confirm the redactions are burned in permanently: a visual overlay peels back with two clicks. Match the production format the subpoena or the parties specify, including metadata requirements for electronically stored information. Produce on a rolling basis if the volume demands it, and keep a clear record of exactly what you produced and when.
This is where a lean team feels the squeeze most. Our enterprise legal AI platform runs a first-pass privilege review across the document set, flags likely privileged material, explains why, and drafts privilege-log entries for attorney review. That first pass organizes the document set and drafts the log; it does not decide what to withhold. Your attorney verifies each flag, decides what to withhold, and owns the final privilege call.
Subpoena productions put your most sensitive documents inside the platform, so security diligence is part of the triage too. GC AI is SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 certified, GDPR compliant, with zero data retention agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic, and AES-256 encryption.
Run privilege review and log it before production, confirm redactions are permanent, and match the required format.
When to Loop In Outside Counsel
Plenty of subpoenas resolve entirely in-house. That's the point of building real internal capacity. But some signals do say to bring in help, and to bring it in early.
Call outside counsel when any of these apply: the subpoena is a grand jury or regulatory demand, the matter touches potential criminal exposure or a government investigation, the volume or stakes outstrip your team's bandwidth, you are weighing a motion to quash in an unfamiliar court, or the privilege questions are genuinely close. Trisha Mauer, VP of Legal at Tonal, described where the in-house workflow now starts:
"I go straight to GC AI for everything from research requests to litigation responses. I've compared against ChatGPT, GC AI gives more comprehensive responses appropriate for a lawyer to use."
The in-house move: do the first internal analysis yourself, understand the subpoena cold, and narrow the scope. Then bring outside counsel a defined question in place of a blank page. That is faster, cheaper, and it keeps you in control of your own response. A GC AI seat runs $500 per month, and GC AI customers report saving an average of 14 hours per week and reducing outside counsel spend by 14%, according to GC AI's December 2025 ROI study of more than 100 active customers.
Bring in outside counsel for grand jury, regulatory, or high-exposure subpoenas, and hand them a defined question in place of the whole problem.
Your Subpoena Response, Run From In-House
The next subpoena will land at another 4:55 on another Friday. This time, you read it before you forward it. You calendar the two clocks it starts. You send the hold before IT goes home, and open the scope negotiation from the non-party high ground the rules give you.
Drop the subpoena into GC AI, the platform 2,100+ legal teams use, including Hitachi, Liquid Death, and TIME. The deadline map, the demand categories, and the draft objections are waiting before the happy hour crowd is back.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does a company have to respond to a subpoena?
It depends on the subpoena and the court, but a company served with a document subpoena generally must serve written objections before the earlier of the compliance date or 14 days after service under the Federal Rules, with production due on the return date stated on the subpoena. State courts and the issuing court's local rules set their own timing. Calendar both the objection deadline and the return date the day you read it, and confirm the exact dates against the rules that govern your subpoena.
What happens if a company ignores a subpoena?
Ignoring a subpoena puts the company at risk of contempt. Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 45(g), a court may hold in contempt a person who, having been served, fails without adequate excuse to obey the subpoena or an order related to it. Even a defective or overbroad subpoena requires a response: serve objections, negotiate the scope, or move to quash before the deadline.
What is the difference between a subpoena duces tecum and a testimonial subpoena?
A subpoena duces tecum commands the production of documents, records, or electronically stored information, and is the most common type an in-house legal team handles. A testimonial subpoena commands a person to appear and testify, often at a deposition, and may require a company to designate a corporate representative. Many subpoenas demand both, so a subpoena duces tecum response and a testimony obligation can run at the same time and should be tracked separately.
How can legal AI help a company respond to a subpoena?
A legal AI platform built for in-house counsel reads the subpoena, surfaces the return date and interim deadlines, maps the document categories demanded, drafts a first-pass objection letter, and runs a first-pass privilege review with a draft privilege log. GC AI does all of this so a lean team can respond on time and bring outside counsel a defined question in place of the whole problem. A lawyer still verifies every privilege call and legal decision before anything is produced. GC AI customers report saving an average of 14 hours per week, according to GC AI's December 2025 ROI study of more than 100 active customers.
Does a company have to produce everything a subpoena requests?
No. Most subpoenas ask for more than the requesting party needs, and the scope is negotiable. A company can propose a tighter date range, a defined set of custodians, agreed search terms, and specific document types in a meet-and-confer with the issuing attorney, and it can serve timely written objections to whatever remains overbroad, burdensome, privileged, or confidential. Get any agreement to narrow the scope confirmed in writing, then work to that scope.
What is a litigation hold and when should it go out?
A litigation hold is a written notice that pauses routine document deletion so relevant evidence survives. A defensible hold identifies the custodians likely to hold responsive material, names the systems and accounts in play, and suspends the auto-delete and retention policies that would erase relevant data. It goes out the same day the subpoena arrives, before any scope negotiation or objection work, because losing relevant evidence, called spoliation, can lead to sanctions even when the rest of the response was reasonable.
Is a third-party subpoena different from one served on a party to the lawsuit?
Yes. A third-party (non-party) subpoena is served on a company that is not a party to the litigation, and non-parties get extra protection. Courts can shield non-parties from significant expense and undue burden, which gives your company strong leverage to negotiate the scope down or shift costs. You still must preserve relevant material, calendar your deadlines, and either respond or object on time, but your burden and privacy arguments often carry more weight as a non-party.
This article is general educational information for in-house legal teams and is not legal advice for any specific matter. Confirm the rules and deadlines that govern your subpoena, and consult counsel on your facts.
