Privacy
Data Retention Win: How Formica Saved Big Time Money with Defensible Deletion
June 16, 2021
A few years ago, global companies began to take a closer look at their data retention practices, often because they had to; the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) would become the most far-reaching regulation of consumer privacy information to date, and with it came heavy retention requirements. A couple years later, the state of California would pass its own law, the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), which enacts similar retention requirements concerning sensitive consumer data.
But even before the advent of these privacy rules, data retention had considerable importance concerning litigation and data breaches. Donna Heil, a corporate paralegal for Formica Corporation, learned this early in her tenure with Formica. Heil says there was a major event that shifted the company’s thinking about the importance of establishing a data retention regime: a commercial lawsuit with a potential seven-figure discovery cost.
Despite Formica’s efforts to narrow the scope, it was still quite expensive. Heil says that while Formica had a risk management process in place with their other subsidiaries, this event triggered her CEO to approach the former General Counsel about putting a new and consistent program in place for the company’s North American, Asian, and European regions.
Heil then went about adding “risk management” to her burgeoning day-to-day workload.
“It was right about the time I started with Formica that Exterro came on board and we put in place a lot of our Risk Management tools,” Heil recalls, which took shape by combining a few major compliance goals with related technology solutions:
→ A comprehensive, up-to-date data inventory/map in Exterro Data Inventory
→ Establishing and enforcing retention policies and schedules through Exterro Data Retention
→ Managing an automated, end-to-end legal hold process with Exterro Legal Hold