Attributes of an Effective Document Retention Program

Preservation of Legally Releveant Documents

• A good document retention program allows organizations to safeguard documents relevant to a law enforcement investigation or litigation. If an organization anticipates that a document will be part of a court case, the law requires that it preserve that document. The law firm of Perkins Coie says "Court decisions may also impose duties to retain documents." The court may penalize a party that fails to produce legally relevant documents.
  
  

Awareness of What Constitutes a Document

• Organizations with a document retention policy need to be aware of what constitutes a business document. Paper documents alone are not the only records that organizations have to keep. Organizations should save emails, work papers, copies of records and related notes. Different industries need to be aware of different expectations. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the body responsible for protecting investors and regulating markets, requires accounting firms to preserve a wide range of documents including internal memoranda and voice-mail messages.
  
  

Scheduled Destruction of Documents

• Organizations with a regular document destruction schedule for "obsolete" documents are on stronger legal ground than those that erratically destroy documents. Parties that have unknowingly destroyed legally significant documents as a part of a routine will have an easier time convincing authorities of their good intentions than those who pick arbitrary times to destroy documents. The Gordon Feinblatt law firm notes that "A document retention policy helps a company avoid the accusation of improper destruction of evidence...:"
  
  

Mandatory Compliance

• Organizations need to ensure that their employees are complying with document retention policies. An article in the American Bar Association publication "Law Practice Today" suggests that lawyers advise their clients to have "go to" people who monitor employee compliance with policy and that the same people should maintain logs of "record purging" and document preservation activity.