A VC - Latest Comments in Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

rfreeborn — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 10:50:08 -0000

I've been a digital pack-rat for years. While I use Google desktop search to manage my life, I've dreamed for a number of years of having the power of something similar to Autonomy's on my PC

http://www.autonomy.com/con...

From the Autonomy website:
A critical leap forward came with the ability to actually "understand" the idea behind a given phrase, and retrieve information which is conceptually related, even when a particular keyword is not used. In the above example, if the user types in the letters "D-O-G", a conceptual search engine will retrieve all the information conceptually related to but not confined to the word "D-O-G", perhaps information about a "hound" as well as "walks" and different breeds of dog, because it understands the idea represented by the word. This is incredibly powerful because critical information is often missed because users do not always use the same search terms.

This relates to my thoughts on the scalability of a service like Delicious. If I tag a bookmark with "NYC", someone else tags theirs with "Big Apple" and someone else tags theirs with "Manhattan" - there is no relevant way to link this data.....but that's a different discussion for a different thread.

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

fredwilson — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:07:24 -0000

Agreed. And probably comments on blogs too!

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

Brian McDaniel — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 07:33:16 -0000

Another lawyer here. I would another legal angle: in today's vastly networked world, between backups, document servers, email systems, etc, I would hesitate to ever depend on a document retention policy that depended on certain documents being irretrievably gone. Plaintiffs' lawyers can be more creative about finding niches where documents may live than you will be about erasing documents from every niche.

In my opinion, you are better off spending the time to draft emails and other documents carefully so they can't be misconstrued, rather than depending on a deletion policy to wipe it away.

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

JayR — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 13:53:17 -0000

My thought, which I see is echoed in a few other responses (typically from lawyers), is that there are (at least) two parties to each email, so when you make a decision to reduce something to email, you should assume that someone else will have it even if you have purged it and could use it against you. In that way, an email (or an IM) is no different from a quote to a reporter or a comment on a blog. So the real issue isn't so much a retention issue as an emission issue.

I have also been deposed and was grateful that I could look back on emails and notes to refresh my recollection of an event, and in particular, to respond to a question that attempted to take a quote out of context. At the same time, a friend of mine in a business dispute was certain that he had an email trail that would prove his side of the story, only to find that the commercial email provider he used automatically deleted emails every 90 days, which would mean he would have to rely on a discovery procedure to prevail.

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

jpayne8 — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 12:12:41 -0000

sure they blur but you don't have to keep everything that isn't personal. you just have to save whatever you define as a reasonable set of things to save. . . and consistently follow that practice. So if you're worried about the personal/company blurring, you can draw your retention policies well above that blur point (or well below it). As long as you're consistently following that policy and the policy is "reasonable".

the professional records managers will say that only something like 10 - 15% of email are 'business records'. That 10-15% is probably very far away from where the blur point is.

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

fredwilson — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 09:21:16 -0000

That damage was done a long time ago

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

fredwilson — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 09:13:16 -0000

But of course since email is two way, just because you delete it, it doesn¹t
mean that it will be gone

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

fredwilson — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 09:04:20 -0000

That's an interesting distinction between personal and company information.

But the lines can blur, right?

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

fredwilson — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 09:03:20 -0000

Like this one jay?

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

fredwilson — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:50:39 -0000

I try very hard to wipe all my old machines/devices before disposing of them

Great point!!

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

Jay Parkhill — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:56:18 -0000

Here's an article that is too good not to mention on this thread:

Man buys used iPod, gets 60 pages of sensitive military data
http://bit.ly/oXFQO

I guess the lesson is that without a plan of some kind it can be easy to forget where your old data may be hiding.

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

dave broadwin — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:52:12 -0000

A friend suggested that I comment on this post. Also, retention (at least of emails) is a theme I come back to from time to time on my blog (http://www.emergingenterpri.... So, here goes: like diamonds, email (and all electronic copies of documents, letters, etc.) are forever. Unlike diamonds, everyone can afford to have them and keep them – and everyone does. If you really delete an email or an old draft of something, guess who will have it for sure: the guy suing you (or defending your suit).

We had a case in our office in which our client got a multimillion dollar settlement from a fortune 100 company in part because our client kept everything electronic and the defendant had a “retention” policy that, in those days, caused them to delete old email. The defendant made assertions in various legal filings based on the statements of their employees, which turned out to be completely false when the old emails were produced (by my client). Defendant’s credibility was, of course, completely undermined.

See also my posting Email is Forever for a similar story about instant messaging.

Having said that, not everything is electronic. Careful attorneys often purge their paper files after a transaction for a variety of reasons. One reason is that saving all those forests of paper is expensive (Iron Mountain loves it, of course). Another reason is the one that several comments pointed to: in a litigation, some very bright graduate of some elite law school will doubtless be looking for the worst possible interpretation of everything.

A story that I heard some time ago involves Larry Sonsini, one of the name partners in the venerable Silicon Valley law firm of Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati. As the story went, he was being deposed in connection with a securities fraud case. Plaintiff’s counsel pointed to a draft document that had the letters “BS” written in Mr. Sonsini’s handwriting in the margin and asked pointedly what that could possibly have meant. Sonsini, is said to have paused, looked at the document, and responded, “Bob Short to review.”

Having said all this, I keep everything, including my handwritten notes. For better or worse, I need these things (including my notes) to remember accurately decisions, analysis and facts. Like Fred Wilson, I have been deposed, been a witness and had to produce documents (including my handwritten notes). I have never regretted it, and in two cases, my handwritten notes (made contemporaneously with events then long gone) proved critical to my client’s case.

Back to email for a moment, they seem to be a place where people will write all sorts of things that they would never say or write in a more formal letter. Be careful what you write and to whom you send it. Also be aware that whatever you send can be forwarded with ease (or with negligence). Finally, be aware of blind copies. You do not know who is getting the same email you just received.

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

jpayne8 — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:49:32 -0000

Relying upon individual users in a large organization for enforcing a retention policy is a path to failure. Each individual make a cost-benefit analysis on the use of their time and they aren't going to find it a useful use of time to think about what to throw out.
That doesn't mean document retention policies aren't a good idea. You merely need to execute them in a more consistent, automated manner because the interest of the overall organization merits it.

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

kasi — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 10:25:03 -0000

Fred,

I take it as an example of how a VC looks at a problem and converts that into an oppurtunity/something-else.

So you had your year-on-year cleaning at home....and you are wise enough to change that to a blog material
for lawyers and digital users....rather than spending your time with your wife and giving her reasons and
convincing her for not throwing those garbages out!!

cheers.

Kasi

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

Shane — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:34:20 -0000

I am the same way. I still have documents on my computer from my freshman year of high school. Hey, you never know when you might need rudimentary research on the intelligence of hamsters, right?

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

Erin — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:53:27 -0000

I have one of those Fujitsu scanners and I love it. The only downside is that (at least for the model I have, which is a year old) you can only do OCR on one document at a time, and the OCR is slower than the scanner. So there's quite a bit of "hurry up and wait".

However, the scanner is quiet enough that you can use it while you're on conference calls. :-)

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

Brian — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:46:11 -0000

If you've ever seen the movie Memento, the beauty of it was where the main character had to explicitly choose every 15 minutes which memories to forget (by burning the polaroids). Our society forgets information too (like your credit report loses negative items after 7 years). Human memory has short term and long term, with long term becoming increasingly less granular over time. Web analytics software has data that becomes less granular over the years. Basically, all well-designed memory systems have algorithms to periodically shed data.

Fred, your word documents are light-weight. Cheap to save and retrieve. What won't be light-weight in the coming years will be all the high resolution photos you'll increasingly start taking, the home movies, the huge .ppt attachments. In the coming decades, our data capture capabilities will exponentially multiply, because data about the world is infinite in nature. So "save it all" must be a losing battle in the end.

The key is algorithmic retention, and optimizing that algorithm.

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

Jay Levitt — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:24:05 -0000

I can guarantee they don't have it :) In fact, the AOL mail system was, quite intentionally, never backed up. Because the cost of doing discovery on THAT, for every lawsuit that might have involved an AOL account, was huge. Instead, we relied on multi-site app-level replication and fault-tolerant hardware to prevent data loss. It never lost a single message, and the last full outage was in 1998.

I'm with Fred. Archive everything; with full-text search, you don't even have to organize it. If you're worried about your messages being taken out of context, what better solution than producing the context?

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

basilpeters — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:05:53 -0000

Geez, Fred, are you nuts?

Ok, you can do this in the privacy of your own office, but you really shouldn't say so publically.

I share the same genetic predisposition (compulsion?). But I learned in my first company to keep it a secret.

Otherwise, everyone else abandons their (pitiful) attempts at document storage and starts to rely on the knowledge that they can always ask me to retrieve the file.

Can you retract this post before it's too late?

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

Guest — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:45:42 -0000

Count me "in" in the detention camp! Wait, that's wrong... Make it the "retention" camp!

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

Guest — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:36:56 -0000

Dear Gotham Gal,
Not to defend Fred in any way, but just as a little perspective, my grandpa used to keep the cork from every single bottle of wine he's ever drank, driving my grandma completely insane...

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

Mr. EB — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:57:26 -0000

What kind of PC do you use? (Obviously I'm not a long-time reader). I use a Mac Pro and I'm thinking of getting one of those Fujitsu Document Scanners that turn everything into searchable PDFs. Anyone do this? Any thoughts? So I can shred all the paper docs.

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

jason — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:06:37 -0000

I'm sending you good thoughts, Fred, because your experience doesn't mirror mine. Too many times, well intended and "good folks" take short cuts in communications (emails, texts) and are purposefully misconstrued by plaintiff's lawyers.

I have been burned plenty of times with what was an innocent conversation and then abused by an adversary.

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

Dell "D. C." Toedt III — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:28:02 -0000

JPayne8, I have to reiterate my prior comment, namely, remember Arthur Andersen. That applies even to F500 companies.

Sure, in theory a large company might save some lawyer time by having an aggressive policy for disposing of old documents. (BTW, electronic-discovery firms have developed increasingly-sophisticated keyword searching software for doing preliminary document screening, which can save significant amounts of lawyer review time.)

The problem is that in many companies, document-disposition policies are aggressive in name only. People have other things to do; they don't get around to reviewing and disposing of old documents as regularly as they're supposed to. And management often monitors compliance with such policies on a sporadic basis at best.

What often happens is belated, "catch-up" document disposition. But that's likely to be portrayed as spoliation of evidence and/or obstruction of justice -- the other side will argue that the company knew or should have known that the belatedly-destroyed documents should have been preserved. That's exactly what torpedoed Arthur Andersen.

So my sense is that in many circumstances, even for large companies, the theoretical cost savings of an aggressive document-disposition policy will be more than offset by the potential downside of sporadic enforcement.

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

PBanco — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:22:28 -0000

Not sure what amounts of people are doing "local encryption". However all transactions from pulling, storing, searching and printing are done with a minimum of 128 bit encryption within MXsense.