Re:How long (Score 3, Insightful)

As pointed out above, this is no different then the rules governing retention policies for paper documents. For records management people this is a basic function of their job. What this means is that you have a regular cycle (a document "lifecycle") where a document is no longer needed for business use, and it is legal to destroy it. You cannot simply invent a lifecycle and destroy at will once a discovery process has begun (this is what Enron did, and a big reason we now have Sarbanes-Oaxley), but if you already have this automatic process in place (which a growing number of companies do for electronic records), this will keep the lawyers from claiming you are destroying evidence to willfully avoid prosecution (the same rules apply for electronic records as paper ones, you must keep certain records for x amount of years, etc.). This isn't groundbreaking, in fact it's pretty basic and surprising it didn't exist before.