Document management and retention are very hot topics as eDiscovery sweeps across the legal landscape.  Firms far and wide are implementing document lifecycle policies to try to control where and how long documents exist in your system; expiring or archiving old documents as necessary and keeping an accurate index and inventory of existing documents so that in the event of an eDiscovery request the appropriate materials (no more or less) can be quickly, accurately and inexpensively produced.

But are your employees subverting your policies?  Documents are like rabbits – they tend to multiply when left unchecked.  Here are a couple of scenarios that you may not have considered that might impact your document retention policy (or that of your clients):

• Paralegal needs to do some more work on a key document but also doesn’t want to spend all weekend at the office.  For security reasons the firm doesn’t provide the ability for paralegals to access and edit documents remotely so the paralegal e-mails the document to himself at his Gmail account.  Gmail has multiple gigabytes of storage space and the paralegal just never thinks to go back and delete that file later – it lives in his e-mail archive indefinitely.
• Draft of a document is e-mailed to a client who receives it on their Blackberry.  They download and save a copy of the attachment to the memory card in the Blackberry so they can read it – and there it stays, long forgotten.
• Associate working on a document does a Save As and saves a copy to the local hard drive on her laptop so that she can work on the document during tomorrow’s flight.  She eventually e-mails her final draft to the billing partner on the matter for review, but never deletes the earlier draft from her My Documents folder on the hard drive.
• …the document attachment is still in her Sent Items folder too.
• …until AutoArchive moves it to a mostly forgotten PST file on a network share.
• …where it gets swept up into the monthly backup of that share.

There are plenty more scenarios where a document can be replicated or stored in manners that are contrary to the best interests of your document retention policy (don’t even get me started on flash drives).  In many of these cases you might not even know you have multiple and/or old copies of the document lingering around.  You may think you expired and purged those documents months ago, only to get the unpleasant surprise that, in fact, there are still one or more copies hovering around.

Now is a good time to review your document retention policies, take a good look at how your staff REALLY works (do they copy documents to their home computers to work on weekends?) and have a good talk about why it’s important to keep key documents and information on a short leash.