Tod, in the U.S., absent a specific retention requirement under regulations/rules for the public governmental body, I encourage you to treat ordinary course of business retention and litigation preservation as two separate processes.  So, Records have their retention rules that apply in the ordinary course of business, but when a litigation preservation duty arises, a different set of rules applies to documents, data, and things within its scope, during the life of the preservation duty.  It's a useful distinction, because the scope of the preservation duty in a given matter will not turn upon whether information is classified as a Record in the ordinary course of business.  And once the preservation duty expires in the litigation matter, and after defensibly confirming that no other pending preservation duties for other matters apply to the particular information under hold, that information can be released to ordinary course of business records retention (which may be disposal if the ordinary course retention period has by then expired).  An in-house lawyer's review and approval of such release is of course prudent.
The preservation duty can sometimes be grounded in specific regulatory requirements (like 29 CFR §1602.14), but it generally expires once the litigation matter has been fully and finally resolved.  There certainly are reasons and requirements to retain specific records of the litigation process (pleadings, discovery requests, motions/briefs, orders/judgments, etc.), but conceptually these are different than all of the raw data preserved and collected for ediscovery.  It seems a shame to lump all such preserved & collected data (sometimes many TB) into the ordinary course of business retention period(s) for litigation process records, which can be many years after case closure.  That approach can unnecessarily expose worlds of old, obsolete data to serial preservation duties in future, unanticipated litigation.
My 2 cents (not legal advice in this forum).

Peter Sloan
Information Governance Group, LLC
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m 816.591.7810
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