P2P

73 I L T A N E T . O R G first time that a firm, particularly a larger or older firm, starts putting a retention schedule into practice, it will likely entail a really big effort, because there's probably a great deal of material to get through and some of it may be very old. It's often the case that firms have material going back decades. We even know of some UK firms with records dating back to the 1700s. The complication of the task is deepened by the need to rule out the possibility of future litigation, or to check for historic value before destruction. It's particularly hard to assess matters if the attorneys who worked on them have moved on or passed on. And sometimes the client no longer exists – but that needs to be verified, and beneficiaries sought. Firms need to try to locate entities in such a way that they can demonstrate due diligence to a court if necessary. Some US firms are dedicating whole departments and extraordinary amounts of effort to this task. There's also the problem that none of this work produces any revenue. Which will dull the appetite of any senior lawyer or partner who's tasked with spending unbillable hours reviewing long lists of material. And it does have to be them – because they're the ones who know the client, what the matter includes, whether something should be selectively retained, and whether or not a potential action could arise from any given matter. As well, and as much as many IT and records management people fully understand the challenges and are passionate about information governance, the people who're charged with making the decisions very often don't grasp the risks involved in keeping information. It follows that asking them to go through lists of perhaps tens of thousands of records and getting them to commit to their destruction can be tough. It's not unknown for lawyers to review great long list of documents for destruction, only to strike through the whole lot with a red pen and write 'Hold'. Or for them simply to postpone actioning requests from the information governance team to review thousands of records until a window of time opens up – which could mean a very long delay. Across the line How then do you get lawyers across the data destruction line? Well, it's about making the process as simple as possible and giving individuals all of the information needed to make positive disposition decisions. And to be clear, the aim is to achieve disposition. Otherwise, all the effort is in vain, and the firm's costs and liabilities are undiminished. One approach that works is to use software to organize the many complexities of retention and destruction. For example, to bring all the data sources together using an engine that applies the firm's retention policies and reflects the firm's authorization requirements as they apply to different clients and matters in different practice areas. Then workflow processes can be applied. Information should be delivered in as simple an interface as possible and should allow decisions to be made at the matter level. The partners or matter responsible lawyers tasked with authorizing data destruction should be able to easily see that, for example, no payments are outstanding from the client and that the firm's criteria for "closed" matters have been met. It can also be valuable to give lawyers the opportunity to dig down further into records as necessary, so that they have as much information at their fingertips as is necessary to reach a destruction decision. Then at last, we're at the point of destruction. This also needs to be done properly. Paper needs to be shredded or pulverized. Electronic files have to be overwritten a certain number of times to ensure that the material is deleted beyond retrieval or reconstruction. Firms need

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