subject: Do I Need An Outside Company For Legal Document Shredding? [print this page] The business of document records management is something that is of massive concern to most legal companies. Because of the sheer volume of paperwork that they deal with on a regular basis, it becomes critical for them to have strong policies in place regarding how they are going to approach dealing with their documentation. While many of the documents that they deal with are going to need to be stored or filed for various reasons, there are just as many others which are going to require destruction.
When a legal firm works with a client, they are going to gain possession of a great deal of information of various types which belongs to that client. However, even though that information has been provided freely to the legal firm, it does not mean that information is theirs to do with as they please. Private information always remains the private property of the person to whom it originally belonged. Therefore, any information which comes into the hands of a legal firm does not belong to them, but to their clients. They need to protect that information by shredding many of the documents which may contain it.
Another type of information which a legal firm may have to destroy is that which belongs to their employees. Working for a legal firm means that an employee is going to be working in what may be many highly sensitive situations. As a result, these companies typically want to screen their employees carefully, which means they may run both a credit and a criminal records check on the employee before they are hired. When this happens, the information that they obtain from those checks remains the property of the employee. The actual documents showing this information are typically destroyed in order to protect that information.
When a legal firm needs documents destroyed, they will typically rely on the services of a paper shredding company that will actually come to their location to destroy the documents. This is always the preferred method of getting sensitive documents shredded for companies that need to reduce their potential liability. An onsite shredder provides you with the opportunity to monitor the entire shredding process, ensuring that no information contained in the documents becomes exposed. When using an onsite shredder, a legal firm can also ensure that everyone who is going to be handling the paperwork signs a confidentiality agreement beforehand.
