News coverage of Enron Corp.'s collapse has put records management in the spotlight. Charles Schwab Corp., State Farm Insurance Cos. and Walt Disney Co. also have taken their lumps for managing records badly.

"All of these companies have great policies and procedures," Jordan said. "They just didn't enforce them."

Regular disposal of unneeded documents should be as routine as paying employees, Jordan said. Moreover, it should be an integral part of a company's program of classifying and storing records.

"If you need the records, you want to have them and be able to find them," Jordan said. "If you don't need them, you should get rid of them and save the storage costs."

Jordan Lawrence has been advising some of the nation's biggest banks and technology companies about records management for 15 years. Clients range from St. Louis-based First Banks Inc. to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. of New York. Technology clients include Kingston Technology Corp., Oracle Corp. and Seagate Technology Inc.

Jordan Lawrence declined to disclose its revenue. It has 27 employees.

The company recently launched a records-management tool, arcMethods, that companies can use to get -- and keep -- their records in order.

The Web-based tool guides employees through properly classifying and identifying records so that the documents don't get lost in storage or linger past their usefulness. Jordan Lawrence worked with G.A. Sullivan Inc. to develop the tool, which was completed in 2000 and has been tested among the firm's clients since then.

Jordan and his partner, Alice Lawrence, are so sure their tool will be a hit that they're changing the company's name to arcMethods LC.

Jordan said many companies pay lip service to records management by developing policies on what to keep and how long to keep it. But relatively few companies have effective procedures to see that records management actually gets done -- and done uniformly throughout the company.

A common problem is assigning records management to low-level employees or a department with little clout in the organization. Without the authority to enforce policies, other employees tend to make their own decisions about storage and retention. Chaotic records management can't be too far behind.

A major bank had more than 1 million boxes in storage in 40 cities when it called Jordan Lawrence Group for help. The boxes were stored under 300,000 different categories, although banks generally have only 800 to 1,200 types of records.

"Every company, it seems, ends up with huge numbers of names for things rather than a standard classification," Lawrence said.

The average Jordan Lawrence client can throw away about half of its records just by coming up with consistent names for them, Lawrence said. They save money by eliminating duplication and developing a retention schedule -- a timetable for how long to keep a record and when to destroy it.

Another problem is the pack-rat mentality, the attitude that a record worth saving should be kept forever. Corporate pack rats can undermine the best policies for managing documents, Jordan said.

With banks and financial services companies, the timetable for storing records often is set by law. When Jordan Lawrence develops a records management plan, the disposal date is built into the system, along with a citation of the law or regulation that specifies the storage period.

At technology companies, managers are more concerned about eliminating records that could be damaging in a lawsuit.

The damage old records can do isn't limited to embarrassing disclosures or the loss of vital records.

"Companies can waste a lot of money digging through old records," Jordan said. One client spent $750,000 researching records that had been subpoenaed. They turned out to be neutral for the lawsuit, but by then, the research time and money were already spent.

"The right answer would have been, 'We don't have them,' " Jordan said.

Kingston Technology Co. of Fountain Valley, Calif., hired Jordan Lawrence after a lawsuit forced the company to go through boxes dating back to 1990.

"They helped us develop a program of records management that was an order of magnitude better than anything we've ever considered doing," said John Sutherland, a Kingston manager. "We're really getting organized. It's like coming in out of the rain."

1. Take charge of your records-control strategy rather than relying on storage vendors, who have no incentive to reduce the number of records they store.

2. Once you have a records-retention policy, you need to enforce it. In a lawsuit, you'll need to be able to prove that you consistently enforce the policy.

3. Standardize the names used for storing records. Companies should have a few hundred names for records, not thousands.

4. Set up a separate program for managing electronic records, which may be harder to inventory than physical records.

5. Test your storage policy by trying to circumvent it -- labeling records as "damaging and sensitive" or sending them to "permanent storage." Bad labels can invite legal probing, and few records need to be saved forever. In most cases, boxes in storage should be labeled by number, rather than using record names or types.

6. Records management systems should include a way to freeze all routine record disposal as soon as the company is notified of serious litigation or other information requests.

7. Check to see if records control software enforces the schedule for retaining (or disposing of) records rather than simply making it easy to inventory them. The software shouldn't allow employees to override an approved retention schedule.

-- Jerri Stroud