Stephen Cohen asked: 

"If you are a records manager working for an organization (or have 
worked for one - not a law firm)), what was the understanding with
outside 
counsel in terms of who is responsible for keeping the records after a 
matter closes? Does the law firm return all client material?"

During my RIM life in corporate America (I now work for a law firm),
this issue was inconsistently addressed.  When litigation closed, some
of the outside counsel firms would contact us to ask where to return our
records, while others would not.  Regardless of where the documents
resided, what would really complicate things would be when what had been
produced were the original documents (not copies; at times -- and
depending on the case -- our internal counsel would sometimes direct us
to deliver original documents). Since the record still had value to the
department that produced it as part of their normal operations, they
would occasionally want to retrieve it ... and they'd ask for it from
the box that they'd sent it to storage in.  However, since it wasn't in
that box any more, it required maintenance of an ongoing cross-reference
to the litigation file so that it could be located, whether stored
locally or at the outside counsel's facility.

Of course it would have been preferable to have made a copy of the
original document and replaced the original in the box.  But, the
reality is that in large corporations with short-turnaround production
requirements (and limited RIM staff), that doesn't necessarily happen.

Pilar C. McAdam, CRM
Director of Legal Information Systems
Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton
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Fax: 213.443.2703

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