subject: Legal Document Shredding And How It Can Help Your Company [print this page] When you're trying to operate a legal firm, there is a great deal of paperwork that simply comes with the territory. This is why most legal companies use an onsite shredding company to come and regularly take care of their document shredding needs. There are a number of reasons why these types of companies choose to rely on professional shredding companies rather than trying to keep up with the workload themselves.
The first, and for a legal firm, likely the most important reason is that there is a certain amount of liability involved whenever you have paperwork that includes private information belonging to an individual. With a legal firm, this is going to include most of the paperwork that they process in a month. Because they could be held liable if any of that information ever got exposed and used without their client's permission, they have to make sure that the documentation is completely destroyed.
The small paper shredders that some people have underneath the desk in their home simply don't do a good enough job of shredding by corporate and legal standards. Many times in the past people have put documents back together than have run through that kind of a shredder. So, these types of companies instead hire professionals to come and make sure that the documents are totally destroyed.
They can also shred documents in a tiny amount of time. If a legal firm tried to take care of their shredding needs on their own they would just end up paying an employee to spend hours standing at a shredder when they could have a better, faster job completed by relying on an outside provider.
There is a reason that most legal firms will opt for an onsite shredder rather than for a company that wishes to haul documents to a second location for destruction. That is for security purposes primarily. When documents are being transported it is tough to feel secure that they are not being exposed in any way. They could either become lost, not be destroyed as agreed upon, or even purposefully explored by the company hired to destroy them. When you hire a company to destroy documents on site however, that is different. Many companies will assign someone to work with the document destruction firm just to serve as a witness that all paperwork has been properly destroyed according to the agreement between the two companies.