The retention trigger for litigation files -- regardless of format, regardless of jurisdiction -- is final disposition of case. In this usage, "final disposition" is a legal term, not a records management term, and it includes the period of time that the case might be in appeals after any lower court judgment. This means that the litigation has to be tracked through all applicable statutes of limitation periods until none of the parties files for any further appeals during the period of time in which appeals are permitted. At the point when there are no more appeals and there is a final judgment in the litigation, the organization needs to settle on a retention period that protects it against any claim of malpractice by its lawyers and also satisfies any administrative it may have to reference the files. This comes into play more for law firm case records, but it's not inconceivable that some party to a lawsuit might claim that an in-house lawyer acted inappropriately in its handling of a legal matter. So, if you're applying an event-based retention period, the appropriate retention rule for litigation records is Final Disposition + xxx Years, and your company needs to decide what is an appropriate time to hold on to the records. The rule for my company is Final Disposition + 10 Years. This might be too long for some organizations, but we use a big bucket approach, and ten years is our default bucket, not including any significant exceptions for shorter or longer periods that we may identify.
--Lee
Lee R. Nemchek, MLS, CRM, IGP
Vice President, Enterprise Records Governance
Oaktree Capital Management, L.P.
333 South Grand Avenue, 28th Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90071
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