Insurance Journal Forums

Our agency needs to purchase a heavy duty shredder. We have a Fellowes PS 60C-2 which would be fine for home use but not for an office. Any suggestions?

You might look up paper shredding services in your area. We've had a few approach us or send mailers, but we haven't checked into them past that. How much shredding are you going to be doing?

It's a constant battle to keep up with the shredding of old files of a 45 year old business. We just cleaned out one filing cabinet and there sits a pile next to our shredder. It's an ongoing thing so we are looking to make a pretty good investment into a new super duty shredder. I thought maybe with the privacy issues some of you all might have ideas regarding a shredder.

We had some files shredded by a commercial shredding company. They presented us copies of their insurance and a copy of their surety bond. We had the choice of them coming to us with the shredder or us boxing up or records and them taking it away to shred off site. At either way, they sent us a certificate of destruction and a bill. They charge by the pound, and the more pounds there are, the lesser the rate.

Might be a lot less expensinve in the long run than trying to buy an industrial strength shredder.

Our office uses a service called "Secure Shred". They are based out of Springfield, MO. Secure Shred comes to the office (depending on the schedule set up when the service is taken out) and empties the shredding bins provided and shreddeds on-site before the truck leaves the parking lot. Perhaps there is a service similar to this in your area.

Document retention and destruction is a part of your risk management plan. There are two parts to a destruction program - immediate and stored items.

Immediate destruction is almost a desktop function - destroy drafts of proposals, client reports, copies that are not needed, duplicate policies.

Destruction of stored records are items over x years that are no longer of value (or may hurt you to retain). Once a year have a service come on-site to destroy storage records in bulk.

Your destruction plan should be in writing in case you are called to task for destroying records. You can then fall back on the fact that you were following well established procedure.

Your attorney and E&O carrier can help you with what items should be retained and for how long.

Thanks for all the suggestions. We have very specific procedures we follow regarding document destruction so that's not an issue. I contacted our local waste management company and will be going with that option (especially after I saw an Industrial Shredder on line costing $29,995).

Thanks