Comment by sk5t

Part of the risk that "document retention" policies mitigate is the risk of a staggeringly expensive legal discovery phase--not just the removal of potentially damaging correspondence per se. Imagine that your company kept 100,000 volumes of dense text on file, and frequently had to pay a legal team to pore over those volumes and think about which parts might be germane to routine legal disputes. Good for the lawyers' billing, but ruinous for the business.