Comments on: Corporate archaeology and the “insanity of retention policies”

By: Purge that data, cont’d

Purge that data, cont’d — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:09:41 +0000

[…] “Aside from the costs, keeping all those records indefinitely is a gold mine for attorneys looking for evidence, [storage services provider John Merryman] adds.” (Mary Brandel, “When to shred: Purging data saves money, cuts legal risk”, ComputerWorld, Sept. 18). Earlier here. […]

By: Benjamin Wright

Benjamin Wright — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 21:48:33 +0000

Any record destruction policy must include a "litigation hold". A litigation hold means that record destruction must stop when litigation is anticipated or pending. But in a complex enterprise, it is tricky to know what litigation the enterprise anticipates. It was the trickiness of litigation hold that led to the demise of Arthur Andersen. The risks associated with litigation hold give enterprises incentive to store lots more records. --Ben http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/07/document-discovery-litigation-hold.html

By: Keith Dickinson

Keith Dickinson — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 01:05:09 +0000

Let’s see if I get this right. Each DLT2 tape I back up with costs me $35. If I can’t destroy old backups, then I have to spend $35/day on tapes. That’s $12.7K/year in tapes.

Ok, not quite what they’re saying, but it could be interpreted that way.

No thanks. By default the ISP I run purges any e-mail over 90 days old in the folder even if the end user hasn’t read it. We don’t have infinite storage space and aren’t about to start the precedent of allowing people to have infinite storage for spam they’ll never read.

By: Deoxy

Deoxy — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:55:02 +0000

The policy of the company I work for is that everything related to legal crap is kept exactly as long as legally required, then immediately destroyed, and they refreshingly honest about it (storage of physical documents costs money, and so there’s less stuff to go through in legal proceedings).

I don’t think they’ve got a specific email policy… yet. I’ve heard some rumblings, and I suspect something will be coming eventually, and for the same reason (nice that they are honest about it).

This retention policy was a major hindrance, since if we did a new project with a particular client, we couldn’t refer back to our previous research – we had to start from scratch (and charge them for it!)

You do realize that, from a bottom-line perspective, having to charge them for something is hardly a “hindrance”, right? heh.

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:26:36 +0000

Well, at least, many company’s do have a policy that is destroy e-mails within 18mos. Whether it’s followed is a different question.

Also, a well-written document policy is not “delete all” policy. There’s obvious exceptions: contracts, on-going negotiations, on-going product development, legal advice, etc. The policy really should be “quick” to dispose of the inconsequential.

I’ll also point out that even with a QUICK policy of 6-18 months, many companies have seen a surge in the amount of things that are even kept that long. With no rules, many people just deleted things willy-nilly whenever they got around to “cleaning up.” That usually happens more frequently than every 12 months.

By: abby

abby — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:22:35 +0000

I worked for a consulting company, where the retention policy was to delete ALL files, documents, emails, etc. related to a project after the project was over. The only exception was the final report, which was retained by the knowledge management group. (This policy was clearly there for liability reasons – the management gave examples of situations where they were required to turn over documents for discovery, and how they were safe by virtue of having destroyed those documents as part of the retention policy.)

This retention policy was a major hindrance, since if we did a new project with a particular client, we couldn’t refer back to our previous research – we had to start from scratch (and charge them for it!) Also, we couldn’t use the Excel models and analyses as templates for work we might do with other clients. It was hugely inefficient.

Most of us got around it by secretly keeping key files that we knew would be useful for future work. But every so often (maybe every 6 months), the company would have a clean-up day, where they’d put shred bins around the building encourage us to take the time shred old papers and delete old files. Again, it was clearly for liability reasons.

By: Commentor

Commentor — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:03:38 +0000

I seriously doubt most company’s policy is to delete email after 6 to 12 months.