Determining which documents to keep and which to destroy requires your company to perform a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, the company must
retain documents needed to satisfy its business operational requirements, as well as preserve documents relevant to any potential litigation. On the other hand, your company needs to hold down its costs for storing records. This balancing act becomes particularly complicated if your company is doing
business in Europe, where your company has to comply with a bewildering array of
retention requirements imposed by the various European governments.
This article lays out the steps you need to develop, maintain, and enforce a records management program and helps get your corporate house in order.
This brief filed by Washington Legal Foundation (WLF) and the US Chamber focuses on issues that create additional personal liabilities for in-house counsel and defense counsel in general; the zealous representation, level of communication and overall relationship of in-house counsel and their clients; and Document retention policies and the resulting liabilities for those who administer them.
This brief focuses on issues that create additional personal liabilities for in-house counsel and defense counsel in general; the zealous representation, level of communication and overall relationship
of in-house counsel and their clients; and Document retention policies and the resulting liabilities for those who administer them.
The rules of civil procedure are once again being amended, this time to update them for document production in the digital age. Judge Shira A. Scheindlin talks about what the proposed changes will mean for in-house counsel. She also gives advice and her top ten tips on conducting e-discovery in the current murky shadow of Rule 26, to avoid garnering sanctions for inadvertently violating a discovery order, or worse yet charges of spoliation of evidence.
Discusses how vital it is to implement a solid electronic information retention system and provides practice pointers for choosing an appropriate methodology to fit your company's budget.
The following article is a primer for non-lawyers in your company on how to audit corporate records to evaluate the knowledge that they contain as one of the first steps in setting up, revising, and maintaining an effective records management program. Because business people in your company may be more conscious now about records management issues, such as retention and destruction policies and schedules, since Enron and Andersen and other recent news-making events, the article explains the importance of going way beyond the outer concerns of what media to use for storage and how long to keep various records. The article explains the importance of delving into the content of the records and asking the right questions about why the company would want or need to keep the records and how the company could use those records to prove its worth in ways perhaps previously not considered. The article also outlines the critical fundamentals of performing a corporate records audit and offers practical suggestions and materials for completing a records audit. The article is certainly not a substitute for personal advice from in-house counsel geared to the particular records at hand, but should help lay the groundwork for discussions.
Provides a sense of the issues that you need to consider in a document retention policy and discusses the pitfalls associated with any document retention policy (or the absence of one) and some ideas of how to proceed.
Explores how a legal department achieved many of the benefits of a matter management system simply by making more effective use of the technological tools already available.
Until recently, document retention policies and advice by in-house counsel on their application were hardly front-page news. The unfolding events in the Enron/Andersen story illustrate how document retention policies and advice by in-house counsel concerning their application can become the subject of intense scrutiny if the destruction of documents and advice on the destruction occur when government investigations and litigation are either threatened or pending.