Extract from Russel Vickers’s article “How’s Your Data Retention Hygiene? 5 Steps Legal Teams Can Take to Reduce Risk”
You’ll see it in news stories that are sometimes fleeting—“OpenAI reveals emails showing Elon Musk backed its plans to become a for-profit business and insisted it raise billions”—and sometimes indicting, such as Elizabeth Holmes’s emailed notes-to-self that included, “Really smart people picked off mado Not you.” The common thread? Email.
For companies like Theranos, Enron and numerous others, the retention of years-old emails dramatically accelerated their undoing. Today, legal teams can take the lead in establishing data retention policies that mitigate the risks from future litigation and investigations yet preserve communications required by law. This article provides five ways that legal teams can create good, risk-reducing data retention “hygiene” practices, and why.
Why clean up data retention practices?
If you don’t need something, why keep it? That is the essential question at the heart of data retention. In an e-discovery context, it’s not uncommon for the “smoking gun” piece of evidence, like Holmes’s notes-to-self, to be carelessly buried within an email or chat message. These communications do not need to be retained past a nominal length of time, but when litigation is launched they must be handed over in discovery.
