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Employers who keep detailed personnel records that include objective, fact-driven performance reviews often win discrimination lawsuits soon after the employee sues. Judges hold no desire to become your organization’s HR department and appreciate it when employers have the documentation that backs up their decisions.

It’s essential for supervisors to document poor performance at the time it happens. Don’t wait until you’re ready to terminate a worker to start building a paper trail. You won’t get away with it in court. The path needs to be laid early, step by step.

Employees who file internal discrimination or whistleblowing claims are protected from retaliation for doing so. To prove retaliation, they must show that the employer took some form of adverse action against them after they complained. That’s one reason employers must document all personnel decisions.

You’ve no doubt heard it again and again—the key to winning lawsuits is to document, document, document. Courts don’t lend much credence to documents that appear after the fact, often suspecting that such notes are made up to cover discrimination.

Set reasonable, objective goals that can be achieved with sufficient effort in the time allotted in the PIP. Don’t create impossible goals that can’t be achieved absent Herculean efforts.

Under the rules of “discovery,” employees (and courts) are privy to almost any employment-related document during a dispute. Keep that in mind when you’re preparing in-house documents, formal and informal. Here are a few do’s and don’ts.

Having a group of employees interview job applicants is a great way to identify the best candidates. But a would-be supervisor may disagree with a hiring committee’s candidate recommendation. If that happens, be sure to document exactly why he or she rejected the committee’s choice.

I work for a police department. When we need to counsel an employee, but not yet discipline them, how do we document the counseling session?

Communication that used to take place over landlines or at a press conference now takes place over a long list of social media services. What happens in the case of a lawsuit?

The IRS and ICE have signed a Memorandum of Understanding under which the IRS will provide information to ICE. Senators have asked the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration to look into ICE’s access to taxpayers’ data and how it plans to use it.