subject: Legal Document Shredding [print this page] Whenever you work at, run, or work for a law firm, you are constantly going to be handling a number of documents which contain information which is confidential to your clients. A lot of this information is just an important part of doing day to day business at a law firm, but there are a lot of laws which cover the private information of individuals that you need to be aware of when you're in this kind of business. The protection of privacy laws are going to require that most of these documents which might contain confidential information of any kind be destroyed in a professional and thorough manner, and the best way to accomplish this is in most cases to use an onsite shredding firm to come to your location on a regular basis and destroy all of these types of documents that your company is finished using.
So what is a shredding firm? There are companies out there whose sole purpose of business is to destroy documents. They have portable industrial strength shredders which are not only capable of destroying hundreds of pages at a time, but also ensure that the documents are destroyed in a much more thorough manner than what results when you only use a regular office paper shredder. One of the most common mistakes made by people who are handling private information on a regular basis is to assume that those desk shredders do an adequate job of destroying documents, as more than one court case has had documents reconstructed from one of those types of shredders submitted as evidence.
When you're dealing with legal documents, it can often be very important that not only the documents are destroyed, but also that the information contained within the documents does not become public knowledge in any way. That is why confidentiality agreements are a very important part of the shredding industry. Most shredding services are going to have a basic kind of confidentiality agreement built right into their contract, however, if you're working for a legal firm you should have no problem drawing up an even more comprehensive and airtight confidentiality agreement which you should require your shredding company to sign. Most of these companies are used to signing all kinds of different confidentiality agreements, and if you find a company that hesitates to sign this kind of document you might view it as a red flag and try and find another shredding company instead.
