Well, Tom, like many things, "it depends." I'll give two scenarios:

In our contract with our office cleaning company, I keep the contract
and relevant communications for four years after termination (based on
PA's statute of limitations on an action related to a contract). I would
not keep all emails that I sent/received from them, only ones that I
deemed relevant to our contract, issues related to, etc.

One organization that I helped develop a retention schedule for has a
long-term relationship with the union that many of its employees belong
to. Although contracts are renewed every so many years, they keep every
scrap of correspondence, electronic and otherwise, forever -- simply
because the union does, and produces decades-old letters in every new
contract negotiation.

So you really have to consider the big picture of the nature of your
contractual relationship in order to answer those questions for each one
-- although you could create larger categories of contracts, like
"building services contracts," "union contracts," and "client
contracts."

Hope this helps,

Gary Link, CRM
Pittsburgh, PA

-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Tom Wilson
Sent: Wednesday, June 30, 2010 2:57 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Contract Relationships, Correspondence, E-mail and Retention

For anyone willing to comment in thread or to me privately offline, I'd
like

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