Filed in archive
Compliance
by leon on January 4, 2007

Most document retention policies are ineffective, say lawyers Kenneth L. Stein and Richard H. An in this piece on the Law.com site.
Part of the problem, they say, is that most of these policies can't stop sensitive information from falling into the hands of others because deleting an e-mail or electronic document doesn't actually remove that information from a computer.
"In effect, discarding electronic files by deleting them is equivalent to discarding paper documents by putting them in a large garbage bin located on the company's premises that is not regularly emptied. Such documents are plainly in the company's possession and may be subject to production in a legal proceeding. It is possible that such documents are no longer accessible (if, for example, the bin was emptied) or legible (if, for example, other garbage in the bin obscured portions of the documents), but there would, of course, be no guarantee that that is the case. Certainly, no prudent company would dispose of paper documents in that manner. But that is, in essence, how electronic documents are discarded."
The answer would be to "wipe" the disc clean, but even that could be a problem, the lawyers say.
First, the courts still have to test these policies. And secondly, and probably more importantly, the parties would have to be very careful. They could be in serious trouble if they deleted documents when there was a reasonable chance of litigation. But then, other parties would have to produce the evidence of intent.
Welcome to the future.
Tags:
document
retention
ediscovery
delete
most
retention
policies
document+retention
most+document
retent
Trackback: http://publish.creative-weblogging.com/publish/mt-tb.pl/47985
Mr Wong
Vote for Why most document retention policies are useless:
|
Rating: 10.00 out of 6 vote(s) cast.
|
Response from:
PublicCompanyHell
(01/05/07 1:15am)
Response from:
Thanh Long
(02/13/07 6:14pm)
It's Good! pls send me the docs
Response from:
news.fatpitchfinancials.com
With e-discovery now commonplace and new rules coming in for handling electronic documents during litigation, legal experts say most businesses are behind the times. Most document retention policies are ineffective.
Response from:
With e-discovery now commonplace and new rules coming in for handling electronic documents during litigation, legal experts say most businesses are behind the times. Most document retention policies are ineffective.
Response from:
Uncommon Knowledge.
Welcome to a special edition of Business, Technology and Knowledge. I’ve titled this a special edition to the high volume of quality content that has come in while I was out of the country — we keep growing with every issue.
Due to the ...
Subscribe
Use the search to look for other interesting posts
| RSS | See all blog subscribe options |
|
What is RSS? | |
| Yahoo! |
|
| Addthis |
|
| Bloglines |
|
| Newsletter | |
| Follow us on Twitter! |
















Barry Cohen, a partner with Thorp Reed & Armstrong discussed this in a Compliance Week article in 2006.
Cohen laments that some companies go through the effort of crafting a detailed email retention policy—and then don’t obey it. “If the policy is to destroy everything after 24 hours and that policy is enforced in your Seattle office but not in your Tampa office, where they keep things for two years, there’s an argument to be made that, regardless of your written policy, you have a de facto of policy of saving things for two years,” he says. “So if you delete something before two years, it can result in a spoliation charge.”