Document Retention: the Essentials

John Lowe

2 June 2015

Why?

• If you don’t do it your IT department will do it• But they won’t be responsible when government

investigators find a problem• They won’t be responsible as well when you lose a

lawsuit or an arbitration

What needs to be maintained versus what you like to maintain• Final contracts need to be maintained, hundreds of drafts do not

need to be maintained.• Email is not a a storage mechanism• Departments must be responsible for establishing and

maintaining their own retention schedules (with variations depending on countries or with a conscious decision to choose the most restrictive practice worldwide, e.g. 10 years for export documentation (Germany))

• There must be a central coordinator,however. It is best if this is the legal department—which must act in close concert with IT

Relationship with other policies, practices, procedures• The document retention policy will necessarily relate to other

policies—make sure these are referenced;• These policies will include classification policies, data privacy

and protection policies, IT policies, etc.• Use the other departments of the company in constructing the

policy—the goal is to make sure it works;• There are a number of draft policies on the ACC website—take

a look at these, come up with a draft and then work with the other departments

• Policy will need to deal with both physical and electronic information

Categories of Information• Legally required

– For this information Schedules need to be completed and reviewed

– Work through this one department at a time

• Operationally Required

– Ways of working

– Trade secrets

– This information may be confidential or not and may need to be encrypted

• Fun to have but not really necessary

– This category includes the emails that we don’t need

– Work with IT to enact reasonable but efficient cleansing policies

Benefits?

• Good retention policies may help in the overall organization of information within your company;

• This is very important—the company may be sold, it may be the subject of an IPO, etc. In that case you will be intimately involved in the preparation of documents, data rooms, etc and you will be judged on how information is managed within the company

• And, of course, government investigations, litigation and third party audits are a fact of life.