When an Attorney Leaves, What Happens to the Client Files?

An attorney gives notice. Somewhere in their mailbox is the message where a client agreed to a settlement position. Somewhere on their laptop is the working draft of a brief. Somewhere in their calendar are the dates that matter on three active matters.

Most firms find out how good their document practices are during exactly this week.

Why this is different from ordinary staff turnover

In most businesses, losing an employee’s files is expensive. In a law firm it can also be an ethical problem.

Client files belong to the client, not the attorney. The firm has obligations about maintaining and producing them regardless of who is still employed.

The email trail is part of the record. An attorney’s mailbox is not personal correspondence. It is where the client asked a question, where advice was given, and where a deadline was agreed. If a dispute surfaces later, the firm needs that thread.

Work product needs to stay protected. Materials prepared in anticipation of litigation carry protections that assume the firm controls them. A draft sitting in a personal cloud account is harder to defend as protected.

Retention obligations survive the person. How long you must keep a closed file is set by rule and by your own policy. Neither is affected by somebody changing jobs.

Where things actually go missing

Not the case management system. That is usually fine, because it is the system everybody agreed to use.

What goes missing is everything that lived beside it:

The mailbox. Approvals, clarifications, scheduling agreements and client instructions that never got filed into the matter.

Local drafts. Work in progress that lived on one laptop because the network folder was slow or awkward.

Personal cloud storage. Somebody synced a matter folder to a personal account years ago to work from home, and never stopped.

Knowledge that was never written down. Which expert is reliable. Why the case was structured that way. What the client actually cares about.

What to standardize, in order of payoff

Get matter work out of personal storage. Files belong in firm-controlled storage. If people work locally because the shared location is painful, fix the friction rather than sending a memo. The memo loses.

Decide mailbox retention deliberately, before you need it. When an account is deleted, the mailbox can go with it. In Microsoft 365 this is a specific configuration, not a default. Decide how long a departed attorney’s mail is retained, who can search it, and under what circumstances. Then configure it, and write it down.

Make offboarding a written checklist. It should exist before it is needed and cover, at minimum: mailbox retained and accessible to a named person, files relocated to firm storage, matter reassignment recorded, access removed on the correct day across every system including the small ones, and devices returned and wiped.

The version of this that gets improvised on somebody’s last afternoon always misses something, and what it misses is usually the system nobody remembered was there.

Know where every copy of a matter can exist. Practice management system, document storage, email, local machines, personal devices, and the printer’s stored jobs. You cannot control what you have not listed.

Match your technical retention to your written policy. Many firms have a retention policy in the employee handbook and a completely different reality in their storage. If the policy says seven years and the backup keeps thirty days, one of those is wrong.

The test

Take a matter closed two years ago, handled by someone no longer at the firm. Without calling them, produce the final documents, the client correspondence and the closing record.

If that takes an afternoon, the problem is not that people leave. It is that the file was never really in the firm’s hands to begin with.

Related reading

• IT services for law firms
• The backup you think you have
• Never click “update” in your practice management software