* Why keeping records long-term is a good idea
Many organizations have a 30- or 60-day retention policy for e-mail content, even if that content contains records that should be preserved for longer periods. What follows is a case that demonstrates the need to preserve records for much longer periods and with more granular retention management.
On February 2, 1993, a truck driver for a tropical fish wholesaler delivered merchandise to a new Wal-Mart store in Hinsdale, N.H. During the delivery, the truck driver slipped on the icy delivery ramp, was injured and threatened to sue Wal-Mart. A Wal-Mart employee documented the incident in a formal report, including the truck driver’s threat to take legal action.
Further, another Wal-Mart employee had contacted the tropical fish wholesaler the day before noting that because the store was opening the next day, it would not accept deliveries, which is why the company had not cleared the delivery ramp of ice and snow. Both the report and the phone record were retained for 24 months in accordance with Wal-Mart’s records retention policy.
However, slightly more than 26 months later, the truck driver sued Wal-Mart in federal district court and was awarded just over $55,000 by a jury. Because Wal-Mart had destroyed the records of the incident and the telephone call to the wholesaler from the day before – after retaining them for 24 months – the judge instructed the jury, in part, that it might be able to infer that Wal-Mart’s destruction of these records was because the company, “having known that a lawsuit was pending, destroyed certain records and did so because…[it]…knew the records to be harmful to its own case.”
There are two clear lessons from this case. First, organizations should retain important business records for long periods of time. In this case, the statute of limitations for personal injury claims is three years – the records relating to this case should have been retained for at least that long. Second, regardless of what document retention or deletion policy an organization has in place, it should have the ability to trigger an indefinite hold for certain records. In this case, any records relating to a threat to sue should receive special consideration and not have a blanket deletion policy applied.
