Law, Records and Information Management: the Court Cases.

• Position: Book Review

Donald S. Skupsky, JD, CRM, FAI, and John C. Montana, JD

Although most people think of statutes and regulations as the mainstay of records management law, case law is an important complement to them. Case law differs in two important ways from statutory law. Courts examine real-life situations and apply legal doctrines to them; therefore, cases provide insight on likely real-world outcomes. Unlike statutes and regulations, case law rarely becomes outdated or obsolete. Instead, later cases build on the holdings of earlier cases, solidifying or expanding the original doctrine.

Even though the law does not mandate a records management program in most industries, the courts expect organizations of all types--whether private business, non-profit, or government--to have a system in place to identify and retrieve records during discovery in lawsuits...