| I don't think I disagree and I don't think Matt does either. The point is that from a bank employee perspective, a hallway conversation, a text message, and a WhatsApp chat might seem pretty similar, and no one expected face to face chats to be memorialized in preserved records, so why the other two? So in a meaningful sense, the requirements around preservation have expanded significantly, and it shouldn't be a surprise that a lot of banks ended up breaking the rules. As he writes in another piece (https://news.bloomberglaw.com/mergers-and-acquisitions/matt-...): > My point here is that when these rules were written, it would have been absurd to say that brokers had to “appropriately conduct their communications about business matters within only official channels.” Everyone understood, in 1948, that only a small sliver of business was conducted in formal letters and memoranda, and that mostly you’d talk about business face-to-face. “As technology changes,” lots of forms of written electronic communication become substitutes not for memoranda, but for face-to-face conversation. So the SEC’s requirements constantly become broader. If you just talk to your colleagues in person, the SEC does not expect you to preserve that. Once you move that chat to WhatsApp, it does. Now the SEC has run around fining a bunch of institutions and sent a message, and so you can expect compliance will improve. As an aside, you'll notice that piece was written nearly a year ago, so this isn't exactly a new story. |
To quote Stringer Bell from The Wire: “Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?”