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

Got something to cover?

[Jeppe Salvesen]

This is a non-discussion. Basically, the question is this:
"I'm making profit by breaking or flexing the law to such extent that my business would not survive the lighting in a courtroom. I know this is immoral. To further improve my profits, I wish to know what a good balance between keeping mails for reference and deleting mails for protection is. Do I keep compromising information for a few months? A year?"

Folks - give your worst advice possible.

Solution

[rlp]

Theres always the Mission Impossible solution.