Firm Partner, Don Kochersberger talks about the dollars tied to documentation.
Failure to consider how you store and retain your business’ documents can be a very serious and costly mistake. Even if they have never seen the inside of a courtroom or been involved in a lawsuit, every business owner knows that litigation is ridiculously expensive and something to avoid at all costs.
One of the reasons that lawsuits are so pricey is what lawyers call the “discovery process”. The discovery process allows the parties to the litigation the opportunity to ask written questions to the other party, take depositions of witnesses, and most importantly for the subject at hand, to obtain documents from just about anyone. Your business does not even have to be a party to a lawsuit to find it the subject of a request for voluminous records. And there are many instances where the cost of gathering responsive documents and providing them to the party requesting them may not even be an expense that you can recoup.
One of the best ways to proactively guard against this potentially great expense is to have forward-thinking document retention policies for your business. Your business lawyer should be able to advise you on the legal requirements for document retention in your particular business, as well as policies and procedures for storing and discarding business documents that can make responding to a litigation-related request less painful and, more importantly, less expensive. Certainly, if you are one of many long-standing businesses that have copious paper documents sitting in storage somewhere, you need to rethink that arrangement with the help of an experienced business attorney.
Contact Business Law Southwest today and schedule a time to review your business documentation. Today is the day to be confident in your business’s documentation; especially going into what could be an uncertain year.
