Tuesday, August 4, 2009

litsupport summary for the week ending on 07/19/09

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. The following is a distilled summary, in the form of questions and answers.

Q. Retention policy regarding cases that "close," for example on a product such as TrialDirector?
A.
  • One should never just delete the case from all drives when the trial is finished, unless specifically required to do so by a Non-Disclosure Agreement or Court Order. Requests to restore a (TrialDirector) case may come up even years after it was finished. Reasons may include appeals, presentations by attorneys who tried the case, and related matters. Thus general retention policy for larger cases can be "forever," stored on external hard drives. Each drive can hold several cases, and they don't take up very much room. Smaller cases which could be easily re-created can be backed up and stored on CD's or DVD's and included in the case files;
  • Alternatively, based on longer life expectancy for tapes, one can rule out every other media and back everything up to tape, preserving them for a common term of 10 years;
  • A reasonably large case can fit on a 16 Gig flash drive which costs $40.
This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

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