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BUSINESS CASE "I tell people not to look for a Band-Aid solution, but to go back and look at the root cause of the problem." — WILLIAM PLATT, PLATINUM LEGAL GROUP "One of the worst situations I've seen," says William Platt of Platinum Legal Group Inc., a litigation-support service provider, "was where I walked in the door of a law fi rm and very quickly came to the realization that the people who knew the information, and where it was stored, had retired." Platt says that, in his experience, many organizations don't have the proper mechanisms in place to deal with docu- ment retention and that they tend to manage it on an ad hoc basis. "I tell peo- ple not to look for a Band-Aid solution, I'VE GOT 10 BUCKS BURNING A HOLE IN MY POCKET. I'M GONNA . . . SQUEEZE OUT 8.33 LITRES OF GAS - ROAD TRIP! HOW DID I GET THIS EXTRA $10, YOU ASK. BY SUBSCRIBING TO THE DIGITAL EDITION OF CANADIAN LAWYER 1 Year Print & Digital 1 Year Digital Only 2 Year Print & Digital 2 Year Digital Only $65.00 + gst $55.00 + gst $105.00 + gst $95.00 + gst Special rates for students and international subscribers. but to go back and look at the root cause of the problem." Platt consults with his clients on a host of issues, including document retention and records management and e-discovery. He stresses that having a document-reten- tion policy is certainly a step in the right direction, but there need to be guidelines in place that actually show the people within the organization how to operate. "It really just needs to have teeth," he says. Platt says his consultants will go into a corporate environment where litigation has begun or is impending, and work GET ME A JUICY RIB EYE STEAK FOR THE BBQ HEAD TO THE TRACK AND BET ON THE PONIES with staff to fi nd out where the relevant documents are. On one fi le, he says, his team went in, "trying to fi gure out what those 300 boxes on the 28th fl oor really represented." With a formal policy in place, the data and documents can be lo- cated effi ciently because they have been stored, or destroyed, systematically. It is often the threat of litigation that gets executives and their counsel think- ing about document-retention policies in the fi rst place, but that wasn't the case at Calgary-based Agrium Inc. For this ma- jor retail supplier of agricultural prod- ucts and services in North and South America, "there was no triggering event," says its associate general counsel Kathryn Heath. "The company recognized that it needed a formal program, more to man- age the systematic and proper destruc- tion of documents when they were past their relevance," she says. "It was also about regulatory compliance and man- aging legal risk." Searching for a cheaper, easier way to attract candidates? To order: call 1-888-743-3551 or go online at www.canadianlawyermag.com 44 A UGUST 2008 C ANADIAN Lawyer INHOUSE SubAd_10bucks 1-4 page ad.indd 1 6/17/08 3:31:58 PM Mascot Ad_quarter.indd 1 6/27/08 12:25:38 PM