Document Retention Policies In An E-World

Posted by Gregg Mayer on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008   

More than ever, business documents are e-documents that companies must retain as part of their day-to-day business practices. According to a recently published article in the Louisiana Bar Journal, “a recent study concluded that 93 percent of all ‘documents’ now originate in an electronic format.”

This excellent article discusses reasons for retention policies in an e-world, particularly the storage of email and other ESI:

It should be clear why business clients should care about the proliferation of perpetual “e-documents” in the digital age: in those “e-documents,” the litigation adversary is likely to find a gold mine of information — or possibly the single “e-nugget” that may be the ticket to a large jury award. From the Big-6 accounting titan brought to its knees in the wake of the Enron scandal, to the Wall Street banking house dealt the “death penalty” instruction for repeated failures to announce its trove of digital data, incidents of failed document retention and destruction policies have served a wake-up call on corporate America.

There are several considerations a retention policy must take into account. According to the article, effective records management includes:

• identify those documents that must be maintained in accordance with the law;
• identify those documents that the business must keep to effectively function;
• track the company’s maintenance efforts;
• lay out a schedule for the systematic destruction of records in accordance with the above guidelines;
• effectively destroy the documents that are scheduled for elimination under the program;
• and monitor and audit the company’s execution of the program.

The article is available at the LBJ’s Website here.

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