Retention Schedule Meets a Litigation Hold
A company's records schedule authorizes destruction of project files three years after project closure. A construction project closed 40 months ago, and the records team has queued its 12 boxes for destruction next week. On Friday, the legal department learns of a defect claim relating to that project and asks for a litigation hold. The records manager is on leave; a junior staff member has already approved the destruction list. The schedule is automated, and the destruction vendor is booked for Tuesday. The company has no documented hold procedure beyond 'legal will tell us.' The project files include inspection reports, change orders, and email exports.
1. What is the immediate priority, and why does the schedule not control?
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The immediate priority is to suspend destruction of the 12 boxes before Tuesday. A litigation hold overrides the ordinary retention schedule: once litigation is reasonably anticipated, records that may be relevant must be preserved even if their scheduled destruction date has passed. The schedule authorizes destruction in the ordinary course; it does not authorize destruction of records subject to a hold.
The junior staff member's approval is not a substitute for a hold assessment, and the automated queue will proceed unless a human intervenes. The records manager should be contacted, but the suspension should not wait for that. The correct sequence is: stop the vendor, flag the boxes as held, notify legal that the suspension is in place, and then document the action. Letting the destruction proceed because the schedule says so would be a serious preservation failure.
2. The company has no documented hold procedure. How should the manager respond beyond this single event?
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The manager should treat the gap as a control weakness, not just an incident. Beyond stopping this destruction, the manager should draft a hold procedure that defines who can issue a hold, how the automated schedule is overridden, how the vendor is instructed, and how releases are documented. The procedure should include a named backup for the records manager so a leave does not leave the queue unmanaged.
The manager should also review whether other queued items could be affected by the same claim and whether email exports are captured by the hold. The lesson is that an undocumented 'legal will tell us' arrangement fails under time pressure; the fix is a written, tested process with clear authority and a suspension mechanism that does not depend on one person being present.