subject: The Shredding Of Legal Documents [print this page] There are many different laws which are aimed at protecting the private information that belongs to individual citizens. These laws require that many different types of businesses destroy certain types of documents that contain information that doesn't belong to them but which they may have required for the duration of a transaction happening with one of those individuals. One of the ways that legal firms accomplish this is by hiring the services of an on-site shredding service that will destroy all of their documents once they are no longer required to keep them on file for their own business purposes.
What this means is that there are companies whose sole area of business is the shredding of paperwork which belongs to other companies. These companies have much stronger shredders than those which are used in homes or offices and can burn through incredibly large amounts of paperwork in a short period of time. They are able to usually complete the shredding of a month's accumulated paperwork easily in one visit to the site. The advantage of this equipment in addition to the speed at which they can shred paper is also that these firms ensure that a much more thorough job is done of destroying paper than can happen with regular shredders. Destroyed paper has been reconstructed for various purposes, including stealing people's private information, so if a law firm wants to truly protect their clients they need to have this kind of paperwork destroyed professionally.
Total destruction isn't going to be the only concern that you have to have when you're having legal documents destroyed. One thing that every company should require of their shredding service is the signing of confidentiality agreements. The information in those documents by and large doesn't belong to the company but to their client's and they are leaving themselves open to large amounts of liability if someone working for the shredding service was to decide and expose, sell, or abuse that information for any purpose. As such, most companies will only allow a shredder on-site if they have agreed to sign a confidentiality agreement, and to have all their employees who are actually completing the shredding doing the same. Clients want to do business with a law firm that they know are taking all of the appropriate measures to protect their information, which is way most major law firms have clearly written policies regarding their use of a shredding service.
