Legal practice records
Law firm record retention: the periods in the primary rules
Updated
Of the eight official sources we read on law firm record keeping, one yielded a retention period our dataset could use. That does not mean the others are silent.
The published period
For practitioners before the IRS, the Treasury's practice rules require written consents to a conflict of interest to be retained for 36 months from the end of the representation (31 CFR 10.29).
Practice-rule periods not yet in our data
Other sources we read, including the Money Laundering Regulations 2017, ABA Model Rule 1.15 and the SRA Accounts Rules, carry their own retention periods, but our first reading did not extract them into the dataset. Read each for its period rather than relying on this page.
Why it matters before a licence
Records a firm is obliged to keep are often client confidential too. Retention tells a firm what it will still hold; confidentiality tells it what it may never share.