IT June 11, 2008 Roundtable Review

On Wednesday, June 11, 2008, SALIX hosted several IT Professionals for an IT Roundtable discussion.
The primary topic of discussion was Implementing a Records Management Policy and Enforcing a Document Retention Policy.

Those in attendance included:
Paul Bromwell – Frost Brown Todd LLC, CIO
Jason Cebe – Frost Brown Todd LLC Records Manager
Dave Custer – Keating Muething & Klekamp Executive Director
Carole Elchynski – Frost Brown Todd LLC Help Desk/Training Mgr
Jeremy Fischer – Katz, Teller, Brant & Hild Records Manager
Debbie Gantt – Bricker & Eckler LLP Records Manager
Judy Groene – Katz Teller Brant & Hild COO
Rob Gunyon – Graydon, Head & Ritchey IS Manager
Chris Hawks – Legal Aid Society Technology Administrator
Joe Hornbaker – Legal Aid Society Database Administrator
Blake Jamison – Strauss & Troy Network Administrator
Ann Johnson – System Applications Manager
Mike Kiniyalocts – Graydon Head & Ritchey LLP Director of Information Services
Brian Knauer – Wood & Lamping IS Supervisor
Rich McLean – Strauss & Troy Director of Information Systems
Jeffrey Middendorf – Katz Teller Brant & Hild IT Director
Michelle Miller – Dinsmore & Shohl Operations Manager
Erin Niemer – Katz, Teller, Brant & Hild Helpdesk / Trainer
John Perry – Consultant
Robert Sigmon – Peck Shaffer Project Manager
Jennifer Stakes – Thompson Hine LLP Business Intake Manager
Gina Traylor – Records Management Supervisor
William Woods – Strauss & Troy Executive Director
BJ Zale – Cors & Bassett, LLC Network Administrator

The question posed was how do you get started when creating and implementing a records management program?

Dawn Alcorn of Cincinnati Financial (hereafter CF) walked us through the steps her company took to be successful. They developed a panel, and had to make smart decisions about who would be on the panel. CF included a representative from legal, IT and their compliance department. After the panel was appointed, each department had a records coordinator assigned to assist in the efforts.
A questionnaire was then formed in order to educate the panel on what type of documents were out there and where they lived. Each department head was asked what they had, where it was kept, what type of media was used to keep it and if they had used any type of document retention among their group. The group collected over 50 inventories and decided to hire and outside consultant.
The consultant was researched through the ARMA network. The consultant who was hired developed and delivered a retention schedule by interviewing all of the coordinators. The message was delivered to the CEO in letter format for approval and the manual was started. This began the informal road to the formal records management policy.

Randy Moeller from The Procter & Gamble Company (hereafter PG) said the tone for his company was really set by CEO AG Lamply. The CEO was very open about cleaning out the old in order to move forward and be effective in the future. If PG could lower their internal operations cost, they could lower their costs to the consumers.

Jeff Middendorf asked the panel if the consultants they have hired delivered?

Dawn said they did to the best they could. The corporations must define what makes up a document, what defines it internally for their business. This is difficult for an outside analyst to do. Once you are able to make this hard definition you then have a base to spring off of. Because CF is made up of legal and business, an appropriate blend is necessary to work across the board. The highest common denominator is the safest.
Dawn had high level support because she was able to illustrate how it would affect budgets and bottom lines. This was critical in giving the policy some weight and making it mandatory.

Jon Adams asked the panel what they expect from outside counsel in terms of the counsel’s internal retention policy.

Randy said that PG uses so many different law firms they don’t really take this into consideration. PG is very straight forward with the firms they work with and is strict in telling them to throw items away. If you let a law firm, they will hold on to it forever. Internally the last thing anyone thinks of is a law suit. But the items they want to save for twenty years plus can come back and be discoverable. But in reality, 80% of what is created is never used or looked at again.
Dawn said they use internal law firms for their work. Because of this, the retention policies are followed and not an issue. But if a firm were to be involved in a case and still had a document that had been since destroyed per CF’s retention policy, based upon the definition of a document, it is no longer CF’s document, which makes it non-discoverable.

Brian Knauer asked the panel when you can determine a document is final. How do you decide which version is the final version, after numerable revisions?

Randy said this is based upon the company. PG has much broader definitions of what makes us a document than a law firm. When dealing with a document management system, use the data to drill down to find what was the final document. In the end, any work papers could be considered discoverable if they have not been destroyed once final versions are accepted.

How does a corporation or firm enforce a record retention policy?

Dawn does regular audits. She does un-scheduled visits to the offices to look at their email systems and inbox to ensure that the policy is being implemented. If it is not, she schedules a visit in a certain time frame to ensure compliance. Randy of PG uses a MB limit and then all items are archived. Through education and self reporting, the company is covered that it has educated and trained their employees on the retention policy. One division of PG actually saves $1.2 million dollars off their bottom line by strictly adhering to the policy.
The best record retention policies are those that understand the line of business and how it operates versus government to industry. PG has research and formula books that much is kept indefinitely.

Brian Knauer discussed how his firm was able to implement a policy. Brian’s department developed the plan and then presented it to the partner committee. The partners agreed to the plan and signed off on implementing it. A budget was assigned to storage and a schedule was created depending upon the document type. Because of the high level support, it has been widely accepted.

Paul Bromwell was concerned with how a firm could effectively communicate the trends towards document retention to a client to reduce the cost of discovery? Is ARMA doing anything to define these parameters?

Randy said that companies are looking to bring this process’ in house in order to control the costs. However, the software available is not consistent and as effective as needed. Crawlers that exist to regulate the system slow down the network and take up a giant amount of network space.

Dawn recommended that firms keep their clients away from keeping a huge store of back-up tapes. Back-up tapes are extremely expensive to recover and thus discover. The shorter amount of time they are kept, the better. If you don’t have the software to recover it, you should not keep it. Back-ups should ideally be recycled every 30- 60 days.

Read the IT March 5, 2008 Roundtable Review

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