Must decide: Stay, or go?

As legal professionals, the storage and retention of all major documents is a critical business issue. If handled poorly, records management techniques can expose the flaws in a company’s compliance policies and can lead to severe legal implications.  

To help address these growing issues, the authority on managing records and information, American Records Management Association (ARMA) will hold its annual information governance event at McCormick Place, Chicago from September 23-25. It’s a conference governance professionals won’t want to miss.

A previous Thomson Reuters board governance survey reveals that corporate secretaries prepare and disseminate an average of 6,000 pages of sensitive materials to their boards each year. But what happens when you no longer need this data? You store it in a safe place – where the pile continues to grow. For the sake of accountability and to remain in compliance with government regulations, the corporate secretary must figure out what stays and what goes, and this is usually a cumbersome process.

At this year’s event, attendees can expect more than 70 educational sessions that records managers, in-house counsel, legal assistants and chief information officers will find useful. Some of the general sessions include:

(i) Tales from the litigation war room: high stakes in information governance John Bagby, professor of information sciences and technology at the Institute for Information Policy at Pennsylvania State University, will discuss how legal professionals can dodge crises by implementing good information governance;

(ii) Technology in the spotlight: A group of trained information governance and technology officers will explore enterprise content management systems and provide strategies to help others understand data security and issues around social media; and

(iii) Your professional roadmap: Komal Gulich, president of ARMA, will offer timely advice on shortcuts officers can take when navigating through the broad spectrum of information governance.

It’s hard parting with some documents but you don't want to be overwhelmed by reams of paper sitting around your office or in your inbox. At the same time you want to develop a system that is easy to use, otherwise this can complicate the process even further. Either way, every professional is bound to leave ARMA with some valuable nuggets of information. See you there!