Earl, in our environment, a significant portion of conditional retention
records are fairly well defined in terms of required documents,
workflow, audit dates, sign-offs, etc.... For example, contracts, grant
documentation, and certain financial records. Then we have
administrative records series related to the day to day administration
of the contract, the grant, the financial process, etc... Unless you
have situations where, for example, contracts are being approved by
email, my sense is most email is more routine/administrative in nature,
and not part of the formal documentation requirement or workflow (if you
do have these situations, the process needs to be changed, or formalized
to ensure such documentation gets out of the email stream and into the
appropriate system. I'm sorry folks, but if people can't handle the rare
or specific occasions such a situation would occur, they should be
subject to disciplinary action - this is an inappropriate use of email).


We apply the conditional retentions to the formal processes, then
develop, in partnership with the users, administrative retentions that
are can reasonably be expected to cover the business need during the
course of a typical contract + the retention. So, for example, a
contract administration record series may have a 10 year retention
(termination of a typical 3-4 year contract + 6 years; in my opinion,
the latter piece doesn't necessarily have to coincide with the
conditional retention, but most users feel more comfortable if it does).

I see this as a primarily operational retention, with the more formal
legal/fiscal value conditional retention applying to the more formally
structured record series/process. To my knowledge, this has worked well
- the safety valve is in the agency approval process we use upon
disposition - in general, the agencies will know if there is a potential
issue, and we will simply put the disposition on hold until the next
disposition cycle, and this does happen on occasion. Having said that,
we have not applied such a system to email beyond training/policy (we
are applying it to other electronic formats), but we are about to.

Dwight Wallis, CRM
Records Administrator
Multnomah County Records Management Program
1620 SE 190th Avenue
Gresham, OR 97233
phone: (503)988-3741
fax: (503)988-3754
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