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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Having worked at multiple large companies I can say this is unusual behavior. Most companies want to maintain a paper trail to defend their actions because on average it's a net gain, not assume their actions are problematic and by default remove all evidence as soon as possible.

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Not a lawyer, but I don't think it's unusual to have a retention policy that says when documents should be deleted. This is apparently legal as long as it's a blanket policy. (For example, by default all email gets deleted after a year, unless someone takes action to save it.) Of course anything under legal hold has to be kept.

It's also not unusual to make sure employees know about attorney-client privilege and how to use it properly, or that you should avoid discussing legal matters in a discoverable medium under the assumption it may be used against the company in a lawsuit. This is basic employee training stuff.

So, yeah, no. Sometimes maintaining a paper trail is the thing to do but this isn't the only thing companies do.

While a specific retention policy is always a good idea 1 year is very short and would often cost you information for any annual process. Their are various standards like 5 years in banking or 7 years in healthcare. And some industry's are required to maintain records for significantly longer than that

I worked for a big pharma (#2 in the world by most measures), and their email retention policy was 90 days. If you have built any enterprise messaging software, you know you have to support retention policy or it won’t sell to the big companies. Slack can be configured to be aggressive as delete-after-one-day

Not to call big parma ethically challanged, but international documents are more likely to Hirt them than help.

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