-written by Todd Yoho, my paralegal, who has worked closely with me for over a decade. He knows more about Medicare and Medicaid than he probably cares to, but no one could contest that he doesn’t know his stuff!

There is a film almost everyone in the legal field has seen at least once. A comedic drama from 1973 titled, The Paper Chase. It follows the journey of a first year law student at Harvard Law School, and his particular frustrations with his Contracts course and professor. Contracts are one of the first things a law student studies, and some attorneys spend their career reviewing, drafting, revising, and negotiating contracts. They are that important.

In the health care, provider world, contracts are the lifeblood of your company. Contracts are how you secure work, ensure rates for revenue, and contain vital information should someone act contrary to the contract. If you have a dispute with an entity, your first act should be to consult an attorney and provide them with a copy of your contract. There should be a section about dispute resolution, which you should carefully scrutinize before signing any contract. It may be mandatory arbitration, it may stipulate a particular venue, or it may cite specific rules and statutes that, if you are not an attorney, may read like obtuse, dense, “word salad” put together by people who do not have to live and operate under the very laws they enact.

But, what if you don’t have a copy of your contract? You signed it years ago, your business has moved several times, or it just disappeared in the hectic daily life of daily operations. Your recourse is that you have to ask the very entity you have a dispute with to provide you with a copy. We’ve seen providers in situations like this, and sometimes the other entity complies immediately. Other times they say it will take 30 days, or 60 days, and you are already on your heels. Without a copy of that contract, you and your attorney may not know what your first step towards resolution will be. Worse if you are on a time limit you don’t know exists.

So, what do you do to avoid this kind of situation? You need to have a document retention policy. Know how long you are required to keep documents, Create an important document archive in a secure location that you update every time you execute a business related document. And make a copy to be kept in a separate, secure location. Then make another copy. It used to be this could be a notebook, a folder, or a file box in your CEO’s office, manager’s office, or with another person trusted with corporate responsibility. A copy could be kept at the CEO’s home in a locked file cabinet. And it still could be. There’s nothing wrong with keeping a hard copy archive, but this is the digital era.

Because we are in the digital era, you should absolutely keep your archive backed up to the cloud. Cloud data services can be cheap, and will pay enormous dividends if you suffer a catastrophic document loss. But, you have to preserve them first. Don’t let them get misplaced. Much like your important family documents, your important business documents are vital pieces of information. You may not need them every day, but the day you do need them, you want to have them quickly and easily available. They are that important. You don’t want to find yourself at an inopportune moment chasing paper.  

Some helpful links include the following:

https://www.uschamber.com/co/start/strategy/how-long-to-keep-business-document

https://www.uschamber.com/co/run/technology/cloud-storage-security

Knicole here. Sorry for the duplicative links. I don’t know how to delete them.