Much of the conversation around e-discovery discusses the perils of poorly executed legal hold processes. Yes, companies do get in trouble for not saving the right documents at the right time during litigation. But let's face it, most inside counsel experience more stress over a far different issue: Their employees save nearly everything forever, driving up the cost and risks of discovery. Unmanaged, employees save e-mails, files and other types of electronically stored information nearly everywhere.

Companies do attempt to discourage this behavior, often with little success. Some believe that this packrat mentality is ingrained in employees and unavoidable. Can employees really be made to change their ways?

Yes, but companies need to be smart about it. Good change management programs can be very effective in significantly increasing compliance with document retention, while avoiding “underground” archiving, or employees engaging in rogue retention. Here are some keys to good document retention and deletion change management:

Create Retention Policies That Recognize Business Value: Many organizations base their record retention schedules purely on regulatory compliance, an approach that ignores that some documents have significant business value. Good record retention policies incorporate retention based on business value along with regulatory compliance. Not all documents have business value, only some of them. The key for workable policies is to provide some level of balance in how many and how long documents are kept.

Give Employees an Option, But Make Continued Retention Manual: Capture your documents in an archive that automatically deletes documents after a prescribed period of time. Give employees the option of saving some important documents longer than the stated retention period, but require them to manually override the deletion period. Some will do that for some documents. Most, knowing that they can retrieve older documents, at some point in time will forget. The result will be that most documents are deleted by the system, without the employees engaging in underground archiving. Use employees' inactivity to your benefit.

Sell the Win for Employees: Too often messages on document deletion come across as the legal department dictating from the top of the proverbial mountain, telling employees how saving fewer documents is better (for legal, that is). Employees quickly tune out these messages. Good record deletion strategies do benefit legal, as well as IT, HR, business units and other departments. Perhaps most important, good retention and deletion systems can also benefit employees themselves. One large company, when deploying an e-mail archiving system dictated from the mountain to no avail. But when they changed their messaging, discussing how e-mail captured in the e-mail archive made it easier for employees to search their messages, and how the archive could restore all e-mail even if the employee's desktop computer crashed (not possible previously), the employees tuned in and got on board with the program. There is a win for everyone, not just legal. Your messaging should reflect that.

Measure, Train, and Monitor: First measure. Assess how much compliance there is with the current retention policy and the amount of underground archiving. Next, train employees on compliant retention and deletion. Include in this training some of the messaging discussed previously. Be clear, prescriptive and function-specific. Once the program is launched, then measure again. If your training worked, good; if not, modify the training. Also implement ongoing monitoring. Make sure the right documents are being saved and any given employee is not saving too much beyond the policy. While it is very difficult to monitor everyone, the 80/20 rules applies here. For example, we have found identifying and directly contacting the worst 5 percent of storage “hogs” can sometimes reduce overall file system storage by as much as 40 percent. It is nearly impossible to monitor everyone all of the time, but taking a closer look at the worst offenders can have disproportionately beneficial results.

One last note: Some inside counsel will never be happy, believing that these types of change management programs permit employees to save too much. My response: Give up perfect and go for good.

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