Dear all,                                     

 

The following papers of the Legal Records at Risk project may be of interest to some of you:

 

·         LRAR blog: Rescuing legal records: success stories

·         LRAR two year progress report summary - 9/2017

The blog summarises, and the progress report includes detailed appendices on, legal records which have already been rescued by archives and I think you should all be very proud of the sheer amount and variety of what you have managed to save for posterity.

·         Proceedings and presentations of the 3^rd LRAR seminar “Legal records, confidentiality and access: breaking down the barriers” on 27/10/17: http://ials.sas.ac.uk/research/areas-research/legal-records-risk-lrar-project/lrar-seminars

One outcome of this seminar was the lack of a consensus on how long confidentiality lasts, not just for client files but for other records….potentially an issue for archives already holding, or being offered, legal records.

One tentative finding of the project to date has been the frankly astonishing dearth of law firms – even very large and long-established ones - with in-house archives (by which I mean a collection of records selected as being of permanent value to the firm, professionally managed by a full-time or part-time archivist and, potentially, made available on request to researchers, as opposed to a basement full of boxes bunged there at random or a lower tier “archive” server) – the project has only located one such firm to date.  I just don’t believe this can possibly be the case, given that there are c.10,000 law firms in the UK, so I’m calling on all records managers and archivists of law firms to tell me that I’m wrong!   If you are records managers who are struggling to make your management aware of the need to better manage their non-current as well as current and semi-current records I’d be glad to hear from you too.  To those of you who have already contacted LRAR about your struggle, are the new requirements of the GDPR helping you at all?

All comments gratefully received.

Clare

Clare Cowling

Associate Research Fellow and Director,

Legal Records at Risk Project

Institute of Advanced Legal Studies

School of Advanced Study

Charles Clore House
17 Russell Square
London WC1B 5DR

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http://ials.sas.ac.uk/research/areas-research/legal-records-risk-lrar-project