Storage of legal documents is now a fact of life for every legal firm in the UK. With regulation increasing year on year, legal firms are required to retain and ultimately securely dispose of legal documents and records once no longer required.
Retention and storage of legal documents for long term periods can often be best addressed through the use of offsite long term document storage facilities. However, you need to consider:
- Your access requirements to the documents
- How you will provide an audit trail of who accessed the legal records and when
- How you will track the lifecycle of those legal documents
- When and how those legal documents are stored
- When they can finally be destroyed
These are all important considerations for compliance, best practice, data protection and adherence to the legal code of practice.
Controlled access to your legal documents in storage
Any access to our legal document storage facilities is strictly controlled. The buildings themselves are completely anonymous, secured with high perimeter fences. We control access to the premises. All authorised access to the legal documents in storage is supervised and recorded.
Unauthorised access to the storage units is prevented with a state-of-the-art intruder detection system linked directly to the local police station. We have video monitoring throughout the facilities.
Our staff are trained to pack and prepare your legal documents for storage. Security starts with collection, we have invested in our own fleet of vans. We employ the drivers directly, this means no outside agencies. The collection of your legal documents in preparation for storage will always be undertaken by Dajon Staff who are vetted as part of the recruitment process.
We are also signatories to the Data Protection Act and our staff are all fully briefed and trained with regard to keeping all personal data safe and confidential.
Advanced fire protection for legal documents in storage
We protect your legal documents whilst in storage. They are held in our safe, secure purpose built environment.
In addition we offer the option of firebox storage for really important documents; this would allow the documents to be recovered in the event of a distaster.
Access to legal documents whilst in storage
We can provide physical access to the original documents, or we can remove the documents from storage and return them within two hours if necessary. We have a range of service and cost options available.
However, many of our clients prefer us to either scan the legal documents prior to storage, making the documents available along with meta data in a secure online document management system or on our secure FTP server or on CD or DVD.
We also provide a scan on demand service delivering a digital copy of the legal documents held in storage, rather than a physical copy or the original when access to the document is required. This saves time, is environmentally friendly and ultimately reduces on-going costs.
Access is a key consideration, when pricing our legal document storage service and this is an area where we will provide advice and guidance during the sales process.
Secure online access to track legal documents in storage
As legal documents arrive at our storage facilities, they are indexed and scanned into our system using a barcode. This allows us to identify where a box is stored in the facility and to track the box, its contents and the activity relating to it throughout the period for which it is in storage with us. All of this data is accessible securely over the Internet via our tracking data-base. This enables our clients to provide detailed data in the event of any test of compliance.
The commercial benefits of Dajons legal document storage service
Our contracts are straight forward and easy to understand:
- We enable our clients to track, measure and test compliance for the retention and storage of legal documents
- There are no permanent removal fees under any circumstances
- We do not insist on minimum invoice values
- We provide an end-to-end service that is secure. Starting with the collection, of legal documents through to controlling and tracking access and retrieval (whether physical or scanned). Through to the secure destruction of those legal documents no longer required.
- We provide a cost option, using space saving technology to reduce the amount of physical storage needed lowering the overall storage costs for legal documents
- We can provide firebox storage for further protection