subject: Shredding Of Legal Documents [print this page] Legal documents typically contain a great deal of private information about the people that are named in those documents. That is why law firms and other related organizations typically retain the services of an onsite shredding service in order to protect their client's private information. An onsite shredder is a company that comes to your location with a high powered paper shredder and confidentially destroys all of your required paperwork.
The law protects the private information of individual citizens, and that is why it is so important to take care with documents which contain any information that does not belong to you. It doesn't matter what a person has hired you to do, if you have any information of them on paper which could be considered private, it should be destroyed. Because you are legally obligated to protect that information, if it were ever to be released, you could be held liable.
One good reason to use an onsite company is that they are typically very fast at shredding documents. Because you can produce so much paper over the course of just a small amount of time, you need a company with industrial strength equipment. The shredders used by these companies are very different than the small, office shredders that are more suited to a home office environment than a law firm.
These companies also take care of the shredded documents through every phase of the destruction process. Most companies also include in their services the handling and disposal of the shredded paper after they are finished with it. This can help protect you further. There have been court cases in the past where papers have been reconstructed from a shredded document, which can happen if the paperwork is not disposed of properly.
When shredding legal papers there are few concerns that expand beyond that of what might be experienced by other types of companies. Confidentiality is the most important of these. When you're dealing with legal documents, not just the papers themselves but also some of the information contained within them could be extremely important to keep confidential. This is why you must insist that every shredding company that you do business with sign confidentiality agreements with your company that guarantee that your information can not get released. This is something that you can also communicate to your clients in order to build confidence in your own company.
