Close the personal injury file and decide what is returned, kept or destroyed
Key facts
- Human involvement
- YellowClose supervision
- How AI is used
- In a firm-controlled tool, list the documents to return, the documents to keep, and the documents proposed for destruction, each with the reason the opened guidance gives. The tool does not destroy anything.
- What the lawyer must review
- The lawyer decides what is returned, kept or destroyed, and confirms any consent before a hard copy is destroyed.
- The lawyer checks whether an Australian law or a court order requires the record to be kept.
- The lawyer reads the seven-year sentence in the instrument that binds the firm before applying it.
Open a jurisdiction version of this task to see which instruments apply: VICNSWQLD
Who does what
| Role | What they do |
|---|---|
| Assistance | In a firm-controlled tool, list the documents to return, the documents to keep, and the documents proposed for destruction, each with the reason the opened guidance gives. The tool does not destroy anything. |
| Lawyer | Set the scope, supervise the work closely, verify every part relied on, resolve omissions and exceptions, and approve the exact output. |
Checklist
- Mark sealed orders, original agreements and anything of evidentiary value as keep, on the Victorian Legal Services Board page, and check the equivalent obligation in the other states before destroying.
- Apply a seven-year period only as the opened guidance states it, and only after the lawyer reads the rule that binds the firm.
- Record the client's consent before any hard copy is destroyed earlier than the period the lawyer adopts.
- Keep the closure list in a firm-controlled tool. Practice Note SC GEN 25, Practice Note SC Gen 23, and the Queensland courts page each warn against a public tool.
Forms and precedents for this task
| Form or precedent | Kind | AI use | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|
| File retention and destruction schedule | Checklist | AI use Yellow | Schedule for keeping, returning or destroying a closed plaintiff injury file, using the client-documents rule opened for New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, and the separate privacy duty. |
Signed-in accounts can read the full text of each one. All precedents.
Sources
- Law Institute of Victoria: File ownership, retention and destruction guidelines · 2026-10-23
- Victorian Legal Services Board + Commissioner: going digital, record keeping · 2026-10-23
- Victorian Legal Services Board + Commissioner: confidentiality · 2026-10-23
- OAIC: Australian Privacy Principle 11 guidelines · 2026-10-23
- Supreme Court of Victoria Practice Note SC GEN 25 · 2026-10-23
- Legal Profession Uniform Law Australian Solicitors' Conduct Rules 2015, current table of contents · 2026-10-23
- Supreme Court of NSW Practice Note SC Gen 23 · 2026-10-23
- Queensland Law Society: Australian Solicitors' Conduct Rules · 2026-10-23
- Queensland Courts: using generative AI · 2026-10-23
These are suggested working checks. Confirm the required checking with the responsible lawyer before work starts; the checking approach does not establish permission to use AI.
Health, wage and capacity records stay in a firm-controlled tool. The lawyer checks confidentiality under the conduct rules that bind the firm, whether the firm is an APP entity, Australian Privacy Principle 11 on security and destruction, and whether a loss would be notifiable under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). The serious-harm threshold page was not opened.
The notifiable-data-breach threshold was not opened. The lawyer decides whether a loss of the health records would be notifiable.