Document Retention - How Long is Too Long?

darthtuttle asks: "With the recent news of document destruction at Enron and the emails that have been discovered in high profile cases such as MS -vs- DOJ document retention seems to be a hot item right now. What document retention policies do people have at their companies, and what steps do companies take to make sure that documents are destroyed according to the policy when their time is up so they don't come back to haunt the company later? Note: the purpose of a document retention policy is not to keep documents, but to make sure they get destroyed according to policy before someone outside the company decides to use it against you. The big issues seems to be backups and documents stored on peoples desktop/laptops. You don't want those email server backup tapes from 2 years ago to be found, and you don't want to find out that the CFO was saving -every- email they ever got on their laptop."

Comments

And Clinton?

[tbo]

Funny you don't mention Clinton, who was quite possibly the most corrupt president of the last century. Now who's biased?

Oh come on..

[Danse]

That's just moronic. They either had REALLY shitty lawyers, or a REALLY shitty judge, in which case they should have won on appeal. If they didn't, then it must be due to shitty lawyers. That really has little to do with retaining documentation and a lot to do with lawyers who apparently don't know how to mount a defense or cite precedence.