About a year
ago, I got a call from an attorney informing me that I was involved in a
lawsuit and I was asked by the plaintiff’s attorney to attend a deposition. I
almost fell off the chair when I heard about this as I had never had any legal
conflict with anyone I was aware of! It turned out it was a company to company
lawsuit and I was identified as one of their witnesses due to my involvement in
the work 15 years ago! Yes, 15 years ago, for which I totally forgot what it
was as the issue was not part of my main daily work, but just something I was
also responsible for as a department manager at that time. I cannot share with
you the exact details but suffice to say, my involvement was really limited and
therefore I could not recall anything what I did for it at that time. As my
initial reaction with relief I thought it would be an easy pass for me to simply
answer some questions, but I was too naïve! I was actually interrogated for 6
hours by their lawyers with all kinds of rather difficult to answer questions.
Fortunately I was well prepared by my lawyers, who spent about two days with
mock Q&A and also told me some tricks that laymen like me would have never
thought about how to deal with effectively. Honestly it was a very good
experience I must say and a very useful one for everyone if you ever get such a
chance for something not directly related to you but you were fully prepared by
a lawyer free of charge of course! While it was kind of ordeal to go through
it, I really enjoyed the process as I have learnt a lot. At the end of the
deposition, I got an interesting feedback from their lawyer, “I’m really
impressed with your English and Q&A skill.” “Of course, I’m the father of
the national debate champion”, I joked with him. In reality, following the good
preparation by my lawyers, I just need to stick to a few principles: never
volunteer any information unnecessarily. Better to answer simply with “I cannot
recall” as needed than speculating on anything. One trick the lawyer often uses
is to ask you something that makes you really stupid if you don’t answer the
way they want to hear. It is a big trap that you should not fall into. It is
not the time to show your ego and how smart you are or try to save your face by
following the normal logic for our daily life questions.
So what’s the
relevance of my deposition to IRM, you may ask? Well, any legal issues are
always associated with abundant documents, big or small. Even for my case which
was really a very tiny portion of the whole case, I was appalled to see how
many documents they had retrieved from the records by both sides. Each signed
paper and each email I sent 15 years ago relevant to this issue was pulled out
on top of other relevant documents, a big pile in front of me. That’s why it
took about 6 hours to go through all of these, one by one with questions! Without seeing them again, there was no way
for me to recall anything about what I did and said about it back then. So as a side note, be very careful and mindful
for any written notes you produce in any format. All could be used against you
in a legal case indeed. Since the company I worked for at that time was one of
the biggest in the world in the sector, they must have to use an archiving
service to keep all the business records. The chance is high that they probably
just use IRM for archiving as about 94% of the Fortune 1,000 already uses this company's
services to secure their documents. Iron
Mountain stores physical paper back-up copies for its clients. The average
document storage length is 15 years. This means Iron Mountain has reliable
revenues it can count on moving forward. What's more, Iron Mountain is not
dependent on one big customer. Its biggest customer accounts for just 2% of its
revenue. So it’s greatly diversified with reliable income year in year out. As
you must know, US is probably the only country that involves so many lawsuits
for our daily life (personal or business). Each case contains tons of documents
that must be archived for years before, during and after the case is done. But
legal documents are just a tiny portion of the society at the grand scheme of
things. Every day, each company or institution is producing a vast amount of
documents that must be kept and archived either for a set time period or
permanently for various reasons. For example I was told by the Regulatory
expert that in average for each drug approval, the company had to submit two
trucks of documents to the FDA in the past when paper submission was the only
way for drug approval. Each year, we are talking about hundreds of drug submissions
and you can do the math how many documents we are talking about. Again, this is
just another small portion of our life. I guess you must have got my point that
record archiving service is a huge business that must have regardless in what
economic condition, booming or recession. In a way, it is a recession-proof
business and IRM is the top player in this field with a long proven track
record. Of course, with a fast changing world that is entering into the digital
era, IRM is not sitting idle but is also transforming to adjust for the new way
of life. You can read more here: Digital transformation is the streamlining of your business and its
processes and models. By integrating digital technology into your ways of
working, you can transform how you operate and deliver value to your customers,
and keep your organization up to date with the latest technologies.
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