The legal system has come up a couple of times recently. Tobin (below)
suggested that the legal system is a form of societal memory. In another
thread, it was suggested that job descriptions are necessary to avoid
lawsuits.
This note is to report what I think is a very disturbing effect of the
legal system on corporate memory -- that the danger of lawsuits makes it
more effective to "forget" than to help remember by keeping records.
I was talking with a friend who is a very effective anti-trust lawyer. He
was talking about his consulting work to help clients avoid lawsuits.
"The most important thing is an effective records retention policy and to
make sure it's really followed," he suggested. "Yes, a really effective
retention policy is one in which everything older than an few years is
discarded, memos, computers records, as much as possible, otherwise it's
fertile ground for opposition attorneys to dig up."
This was some years ago in the heyday of anti-trust, and I suspect that
the threat is now in other lines of litigation, but I'll be that the
imperative is still in place: "Don't keep anything that the enemies can
learn from!"
I'm worried that the records being systematically destroyed include
learning histories and other documentation that people could still learn
from.
On Sun, 31 Dec 1995, Tobin Quereau wrote:
> I have another possible focus for this thread which came to me as a result
> of an unfortunate circumstance I have been dealing with recently. The
> situation has required the assistance of a lawyer (or two), and as I
> watched the process of their work, the relevance of the legal field to
> "corporate memory" was sparked. Isn't the entire western legal tradition a
> sort of "cultural/societal memory?"
--
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