It’s specifically corporate policy in the auto industry — records older than x years that don’t directly relate to warranty, service or ongoing litigation are to be destroyed with annual reviews to ensure this. It means that if you sue long enough after the fact discovery won’t yield anything because it’s policy to not have anything responsive to negligence in design. This has been official policy since at least the 1980s, but probably longer than that. I think this sort of policy should be discouraged, but I understand the chain of unintended consequences in jurisprudence and regulation that created the incentives to result in this policy.
not just in the auto industry. In many companies max retention of most documents is 5 years. emails less than that by default. Chats less than 30 days is also in place in some companies. CYA tactics everywhere.
It's a pretty stupid tactic, because judges can give instructions to juries to presume adverse interference—assume that the emails existed at one time, but are not available in the present precisely because of these "CYA" policies—as happened in Apple v. Samsung.
There's an offshoot of the Gell–Mann amnesia effect in play here. When programmers encounter Web sites that enact ridiculous requirements about passwords, they complain of bozos being in charge of technical decisionmaking, and then making decisions that either don't make sense or are downright bad based on nothing other than cargo cult advice. There are plenty of cargo cultists in management and legal departments, too, but they're often given the benefit of the doubt. Obviously they know what they're doing and have good reasons for everything, right? You know, just like the reason that a site requires you to have digits and punctuation in your password, but forbids you to have a 6-word passphrase because it's too long and contains spaces.
But judges generally will not give instructions to assume adverse circumstance if the company is following a pre-defined document retention policy. That's the point of the policy. It's effective CYA.
In the case I cited, Samsung was doing exactly that, and the judge did give those instructions.
The pro-CYA argument also fails to account for aggregate cost of employees running into roadblocks because the crucial piece of information they need to complete their task was sent in an email two weeks and one day ago, so they no longer have a copy.