It is an understatement to say that a lot of information exchanges hands in the legal process. Electronic evidence piles up during the e-discovery process for lawsuits and regulatory investigations. Lawyers preserve and gather facts and information from clients. Opposing counsel and government regulators also demand that the parties share information with them. Imagine the volume of information that is gathered, duplicated and shared during legal proceedings for a large corporation over, say, a five-year period. It is astronomical. Many law firms and corporations house tens of terabytes (a unit of information equal to one million million) of information in their e-discovery infrastructure.
Hoarding Not Good in Cyber-threat Environment
So what happens to all of this legal information once a case is closed? And where is it all stored? How secure is it, and who has access to it? This is where the lawyer’s genetic disposition to hoard and keep all the information in legal matters comes into play. Many lawyers want to keep everything because they fear they will be asked for it at a later time by a judge, regulator or client. Yet, courts regularly uphold destruction of information done consistently under a reasonable records retention program. Records retention programs establish how organizations manage the life cycle of their information assets, including destroying information that has been retained for the period of time required to meet legal and business mandates. At law firms, partners have fallen into the habit of keeping client data for years so clients have to come to them if the information is needed in a new matter, which the firm would like to handle. Yet, surely a trusted advisor relationship is a better form of business development.
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