A series of legal events means that companies that have no business reason to retain documents or records may be compelled to create and retain such records just so they can become available for discovery.
Companies routinely create, maintain and store electronic records. Some records are consciously created – like memoranda, letters, spreadsheets, and even e-mails and chat or instant message communications. Other records are created inadvertently, like meta data, log records, IP history records and the like. Some information is useful to the company, and it wants to retain it, and other information is of little use, merely takes up space, creates potential liability, and represents an unwarranted threat for attack or violation of privacy. The problem for most companies in developing or maintaining a document retention/destruction policy is identifying the documents and records it wants to keep and effectively purging the ones it doesn"t want. Some recent legal events have made the problem of document retention and destruction even more complicated.