Keeping Records Long Enough

A closed matter answers to more than one clock, and the clocks disagree. Your bar sets a minimum retention period for the client file. Most VAT regimes set their own, usually counted from the end of the tax year in which an invoice was issued, and often longer than the professional-conduct rule. Malpractice exposure runs on a third clock entirely: a claim can surface years after the last document was filed, and the limitation period may start only when the harm is discovered.

The safe window is the longest of the three, applied per record class. A disbursement receipt and a signed opinion do not expire together. Treat retention as a schedule, not a single date, and set the schedule at the moment the matter opens rather than the moment it closes.

Software is temporary. Vendors are acquired, formats are deprecated, contracts lapse. If your only copy of a receipt from six years ago lives inside a database you no longer license, the record is gone in every way that matters to an auditor or a court. The retention obligation attaches to the information, not to the application that happened to store it.

This is why open-format export is a survival requirement rather than a convenience. A file you can read with ordinary tools, spreadsheets, PDFs, plain documents, is a file that survives a change of vendor. Mersal keeps every matter fully exportable for the life of the record and after archival, and offers a one-click Excel export of the payments ledger for accountants, so the account of what was billed and received leaves in a format that does not depend on us.

Ask any system you rely on a single question: if we left tomorrow, what could we walk out with?

Retention is not storage. A matter kept for seven years is worthless if half its context has been pruned to save space. The correspondence explains the invoice. The conflict waiver explains why the matter was accepted. The audit ledger explains who changed what and when. Strip these and you are left with documents no one can defend.

Archiving should remove a matter from daily view while preserving the whole record intact. In Mersal an archived matter retains its complete timeline, parties, documents, money and audit trail, and remains exportable. The append-only audit ledger, enforced at the database against every role, means the history you retain is the history that actually occurred.