James Farrell & Trevor Davies put international document retention procedures under the spotlight
In most jurisdictions, document retention requirements are spread across a plethora of legislation, regulations and professional guidance notes, often relating to a specific sector—such as for the financial services industry, the energy sector or the telecommunications market. Fundamentally, document management policies have two key driving forces:
(i) the requirement to retain documents under various regulatory and legislative regimes; and
(ii) the requirement to delete or destroy certain data, usually personal data, within prescribed timeframes.
However, these requirements often differ dramatically between jurisdictions, with very little international standardisation—even among the member states of the EU. In response to the lack of guidance on the wide reaching areas of document management and retention, Herbert Smith and its Alliance partners Gleiss Lutz and Stibbe have recently launched a review of document retention practices in 22 jurisdictions (Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, England and Wales, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, UAE and
