Growing companies that go through consistent internal growth and acquisitions, generate an enormous amount of records during the course of business.  The volume of these records for any given company is growing exponentially.  In the light of new and more frequent e-discovery requests, the time has come for a lot of these companies with no formal policy to address how long records need to be retained.  This has led to a multi-year records retention and information management project where Raven Bay is assigned to manage this project for one of our clients.

With the rising cost of physical storage, due to outsourced providers, legal departments are concerned that some critical records might be destroyed earlier than they should. Other records are retained longer than they should be which could be used in legal discovery action. All contribute to the impact of ineffective records management and create corporate risk. In the initiative by our client to reduce these risks, Raven Bay and the Legal Department teamed up with IT to analyze the business records. We’ve come up with a suitable records retention policy and records retention schedule to mitigate these risks.

The first phase of the project was to determine what record types are used within the business. Discussing with employees at all levels of the business, we found out what's out there.  Next step was to obtain some legal research from outside experts as to what legislation, statutes and regulations exist that might be applicable to the client's business. With a detailed inventory of existing record types, plus the list of legal citations the client's, records were then matched to the legislation.  The client confirmed if they agreed with the suggested retention periods or revised them to meet any operational business needs.

Raven Bay's Project Manager and the VP of legal used a guideline for the policy provided by the external legal advisors and compared it to the two available ISO standards on records management as well as other records management best practice documentation.  The result was a records retention policy that the client's executive team could hang their hat on.

About seven months after the initial roll out the various departments have felt empowered to destroy copious amounts of documentation that have outlived their useful life while still retaining the company’s vital records.  Training materials were created by Raven Bay and delivered by the company’s Legal team and was well received with representatives from all functional areas in Canada and the US.

The project continues today with a more focused approach to electronic records management where the ultimate goal is solution investigation for ensuring policy compliance at the electronic records level including network files and emails.