On March 28th the Mattern Team presented: “Get Out of Offsite Records Storage in 10 Years.” To say it generated interest is an understatement.
Over 81 individuals signed up for the webinar representing over 75 firms. Our typical webinar generates about half that amount of interest. Firms are starting to get serious about attacking their offsite holdings.
Some of the strategies we discussed can be found in our case study, highlighting the recent success at Chamberlain, Hrdlicka, White, Williams & Aughtry. We were able to help the firm get into position to get out of offsite storage in ten years by radical reduction of the permanent withdrawal fees. Read the case study above for more details.
Also discussed was the status of firms’ retention schedules for both paper and electronic files—a shocking zero percent of responding firms to this live survey question indicated that they were in a compliance with their policies. Eleven firms indicated that they did have a policy for paper records but not an approved policy for electronic records.
Based upon the submitted questions during the webinar, top reasons given for the lack of compliance are:
- Cooperation of attorneys
- Cost of compliance
- Under the firm’s current offsite contract, it costs too much to destroy the stored boxes
- No retention policy in place
Clearly much work needs to be done in this area however the bright spot is that each of these “hurdles” are easily solvable. You can request a recording of the webinar at ssechter@matternassoc.com, but talking about your firm’s specific objectives and challenges can be even more productive. If your firm is firm is facing any of these hurdles, let’s talk: rmattern@matternassoc.com.
