Not having proper documentation or having erroneous documentation can come back to haunt you if your company is ever involved in an employee lawsuit. If you have good documentation then you are going want to easily find all of it when legal issues occur. Getting involved in a lawsuit of any type can mean spending a ton of time and energy searching through paper as the opposing legal team floods you with a wave of requests for relevant documentation. You could end up spending hundreds if not thousands of hours retrieving and sorting paper.
Example: The following is an actual case where an employer tried enforcing a non-competing agreement.
In this actual case, a key employee left the company to work with a business that did not compete directly with them, but did compete directly with its customers. The key point for the plaintiff was that its customers business would suffer and indirectly hurt their business.
While the case was interesting, one sidebar was the amount of time and effort the plaintiff company had to spend gathering documentation to present its case.
On one hand there was a team of people who were gathering all the information it could to prove that what the employee knew could in fact help the defending company and ultimately hurt the plaintiff. Types of documentation searched for was manufacturing records, product design review notes, internal correspondence, specifications, manufacturing instructions, quality records of all the products that were applicable. Dozens and dozens of boxes of documents were searched through going back over 3 years.
Then there was a separate effort of documentation gathering based on requests from the way ward employee's legal team. They wanted to know exactly how secret these trade secrets were, and who else had non-compete agreements. In the end several man weeks of time was spent sorting through boxes of documentation. Had the documentation been in searchable electronic format such as a searchable pdf- the process would have been much easier.
The judge quickly ruled in favor of the employee because, he felt the interpretation of that agreement was too broad. In reality no amount of documentation gathered was going to change the verdict, but what could have changed is the amount of time spent gathering the documentation. If all the documentation was in a searchable electronic format, the time spent would have been minimal.
As was the case in this example, just being involved in legal action can be very expensive, regardless if you have an open and shut case, or if the case even makes it to court. It is not uncommon for opposing sides in litigation to "bury" the other side with information requests. If your documentation is suspect, you are giving the opposing attorney an avenue to increase your litigation cost and perhaps finds some advantage in the courtroom.
As a business you can get dragged into courts by employees for a number of reasons:
Discrimination, sexual harassment, wrongful termination, retaliation, workman's comp, and constructive discharge are just some of the reasons that you could become involved in a lawsuit.
While potential litigation may not be justification enough to digitize your paper into searchable electronic data, it is at least a consideration when weighing the pros and cons of digitizing your documents.
Rick Romens is president of Microfacs, a privately owned company that specializes in the digital document conversion [http://www.microfacs.com:]; specifically Microfacs excels in microfiche conversion, microfilm conversion and aperture card conversion.
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