You'll also spend money on the legal fees required to have your lawyer (or paralegal) review your diaries / journals to see what parts must be produced to the o

You'll also spend money on the legal fees required to have your lawyer (or paralegal) review your diaries / journals to see what parts must be produced to the other side and what parts can be withheld. Here's an example of what can happen if you don't screen your document production. I once took the deposition of a guy who was suing my client, his former employer, claiming that he owned an invention he'd made for them. The guy kept a diary. Instead of giving me only the diary entries that had to do with the invention, his lawyer just turned over the entire diary for the relevant period -- including entries about feeding live mice to his pet snake. Needless to say, in the deposition I asked the guy about that. Snake-feeding was completely irrelevant to the case, but if we'd gone to trial, I imagine I would have tried to find some way to put that testimony and those diary entries in front of the jury. (We didn't go to trial because the judge granted summary judgment for my client.) My guess is that the lawyer wished he'd screened the diary before producing it to me.