Why Legal Document Shredding Is Essential for Law Firms

If you are a partner at a law firm, you probably know that shredding documents is not only necessary – it’s the law. Most states have laws mandating that documents need to be shredded after a certain amount of time. There are even some federal laws that require you to shred documents that contain information that is top secret or confidential. Not only do these documents feature names and case information, but they may also contain home addresses, social security numbers and banking information. Indeed, your documents could be used in stealing identities. Here are some reasons why legal document shredding is so essential for law firms.

First and foremost, you want to shred documents to protect your business. There is a good chance that much of the information you have piling up in folders contains extremely private and confidential knowledge about your law firm. The last thing you want is for this information to be leaked or to get into the wrong hands. The information may also contain names of employees, addresses and financial records, so you want to do your best to stay on a good shredding schedule.

Next, you want to make sure that you protect your clients. This is perhaps the most important and imperative reason why you want to shred your documents. Not only is there sensitive case information, but there is probably sensitive personal information as well – including financial documentation. The last thing you want is for a case file to get taken out of your trash and used for nefarious purposes. If you run a criminal law firm, not shredding documents can pose a serious risk to your clients – you don’t want a data breach that could cause a client financial harm or physical harm.

Also, document shredding is critical for the sake of making room. If you have a lot of cases each year, you probably have a lot of backlog. So, to make up room for new files, you want to shred the old ones. After a while, it can become quite expensive to maintain all those documents, especially if you have to afford extra overhead. So, document shredding is a little bit like cleaning house. If you have a busy law firm, you should be shredding every few months or so – especially older case files. You can always scan the important information and store it on a secure server.

Lastly, document shredding is important because it is the law. State and federal laws mandate that you must shred documents after a certain amount of time, especially if you intend on throwing them out. This is the reason why you want to hire a document shredding service, like Global Document Solutions. Not only will they make sure to shred your documents – they will also do it securely and on-site. When it comes to document shredding, you want a service that is convenient and fast. In the end, there are probably more important things that your law firm has going on than shredding a bunch of documents.