Selasa, 02 September 2014

Benefit of a Email Retention Policy

The growing shift from paper documents to electronic data has allowed many companies to cut costs, increase efficiency, and retain more data than ever before. This is especially true in the construction industry, where more and more project documents are maintained as email files. However, when litigation arises, you may be required to produce all of your project documents, which can be cumbersome, costly, and potentially detrimental to your case unless you follow a document retention policy.

The standards applied by a court for what is discoverable, and therefore what should be retained, is generally very broad. The discovery process casts a wide net over a party’s records: any documents or records that could lead to the discovery of relevant evidence may be requested during discovery. Additionally, the requirement to retain documents and records actually attaches once litigation has become reasonably foreseeable. Thus, if you don’t have a formal plan in place to handle document retention before litigation occurs, it may be too late to do anything about it once litigation has begun. If that is the case, a court could penalize you for failing to properly preserve your records.

A document retention policy is not simply a policy to keep and then later destroy documents. At a very basic level, there are three simple steps that you should consider for your document retention policy.



First, you should consider maintaining a backup of electronic data for a sufficient amount of time. The rules do allow for the routine, periodic deletion of this data, but if impending litigation is foreseeable then you must take steps to preserve any possible evidence. Not only does keeping a backup make sense from a legal perspective, but, due to the fickle nature of computers, it makes sense from a business perspective to take extra precautions against losing valuable information.

Second, once litigation is reasonably foreseeable you should communicate clearly with employees about the importance of document retention and actively monitor their performance in that capacity. The costs of taking these preventative measures will be far less than the potential costs associated with lost or deleted documents and records.

Finally, you should develop and maintain a system for organizing any potentially relevant paper documents. Even though more and more information is being stored electronically, it is still important to have a system in place to ensure the retention of paper documents.

The suggestions set forth in this e-brief are very basic and are offered as an overview. A good document retention policy is not created overnight. Prior to creating a policy, you should consult with your informational technology personnel and legal counsel. In addition, if you do implement a document retention policy, use it as it is intended. Otherwise, courts may take an even dimmer view of a failure to keep documents related to pending litigation.