Pete Warden (Aug. 14) is reminded of Dickens’ line about the great purpose of the law being to make business for itself, even as it gives everyone else reason to vandalize potentially invaluable data:
…Retention policy is a euphemism for deletion policy. Emails over a certain age are deleted, even from backups, usually after 6 or 12 months. The sole reason for this is so that if you’re sued, you aren’t able to hand over older documents, and there’s no question that you deleted them specifically out of a guilty conscience, it’s just your blanket policy. …
There’s no good technical reason for deleting old emails. You’ve made those backup tapes, it’s actually more work to make sure that old ones are destroyed. …
Email is the collective memory of an organization, and removing old emails is deliberate corporate amnesia. It’s needed because so many recent court cases have hinged on ‘incriminating’ memos, and with thousands of messages written every day, it’s almost certain that somebody’s dry sarcasm could be painted as deadly serious in front of a jury.
Why does this matter? You’re losing the history of the company. Unless you have explicitly copied them, all those old conversations and attachments you might need to refer back to one day are gone. It’s like putting a back-hoe through an archaeological site, you can never get that information back. Just like archeology, I’m convinced that there will be new techniques in the future that can pull more information out of that data than we can today. Old email should be an asset, not a liability. Unfortunately as long as the legal climate keeps companies terrified of losing the litigation lottery, they’ll keep deleting.
7 Comments
I seriously doubt most company’s policy is to delete email after 6 to 12 months.
I worked for a consulting company, where the retention policy was to delete ALL files, documents, emails, etc. related to a project after the project was over. The only exception was the final report, which was retained by the knowledge management group. (This policy was clearly there for liability reasons – the management gave examples of situations where they were required to turn over documents for discovery, and how they were safe by virtue of having destroyed those documents as part of the retention policy.)
This retention policy was a major hindrance, since if we did a new project with a particular client, we couldn’t refer back to our previous research – we had to start from scratch (and charge them for it!) Also, we couldn’t use the Excel models and analyses as templates for work we might do with other clients. It was hugely inefficient.
Most of us got around it by secretly keeping key files that we knew would be useful for future work. But every so often (maybe every 6 months), the company would have a clean-up day, where they’d put shred bins around the building encourage us to take the time shred old papers and delete old files. Again, it was clearly for liability reasons.
Well, at least, many company’s do have a policy that is destroy e-mails within 18mos. Whether it’s followed is a different question.
Also, a well-written document policy is not “delete all” policy. There’s obvious exceptions: contracts, on-going negotiations, on-going product development, legal advice, etc. The policy really should be “quick” to dispose of the inconsequential.
I’ll also point out that even with a QUICK policy of 6-18 months, many companies have seen a surge in the amount of things that are even kept that long. With no rules, many people just deleted things willy-nilly whenever they got around to “cleaning up.” That usually happens more frequently than every 12 months.
The policy of the company I work for is that everything related to legal crap is kept exactly as long as legally required, then immediately destroyed, and they refreshingly honest about it (storage of physical documents costs money, and so there’s less stuff to go through in legal proceedings).
I don’t think they’ve got a specific email policy… yet. I’ve heard some rumblings, and I suspect something will be coming eventually, and for the same reason (nice that they are honest about it).
You do realize that, from a bottom-line perspective, having to charge them for something is hardly a “hindrance”, right? heh.
Let’s see if I get this right. Each DLT2 tape I back up with costs me $35. If I can’t destroy old backups, then I have to spend $35/day on tapes. That’s $12.7K/year in tapes.
Ok, not quite what they’re saying, but it could be interpreted that way.
No thanks. By default the ISP I run purges any e-mail over 90 days old in the folder even if the end user hasn’t read it. We don’t have infinite storage space and aren’t about to start the precedent of allowing people to have infinite storage for spam they’ll never read.
Any record destruction policy must include a “litigation hold”. A litigation hold means that record destruction must stop when litigation is anticipated or pending. But in a complex enterprise, it is tricky to know what litigation the enterprise anticipates. It was the trickiness of litigation hold that led to the demise of Arthur Andersen. The risks associated with litigation hold give enterprises incentive to store lots more records. –Ben http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/07/document-discovery-litigation-hold.html
[…] “Aside from the costs, keeping all those records indefinitely is a gold mine for attorneys looking for evidence, [storage services provider John Merryman] adds.” (Mary Brandel, “When to shred: Purging data saves money, cuts legal risk”, ComputerWorld, Sept. 18). Earlier here. […]