Verified against ChatGPT · 2026-08-14
Draft a record retention schedule from your actual document types, not a generic industry template
Builds a record retention schedule mapped to your organization's real document categories and business reasons for keeping or discarding them, flagging every retention period that needs actual legal confirmation instead of asserting one.
The prompt
Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.
Draft a record retention schedule from the document categories below, organized by business function, with every retention period flagged as needing legal confirmation rather than stated as settled. OUR DOCUMENT CATEGORIES Employee personnel files, signed customer contracts, accounts payable invoices, terminated-employee records, server access logs. BUSINESS REASONS WE CURRENTLY KEEP OR DISCARD THINGS We keep invoices 7 years because finance has always done it that way; nobody remembers if that's from a specific requirement. KNOWN LEGAL HOLDS OR PENDING MATTERS All records related to the Jensen contract dispute are under a hold since March 2026 per outside counsel instruction. STORAGE OR SYSTEM CONSTRAINTS Current document management system has a hard 10-year archive limit before automatic purge, which nobody has reconciled against legal requirements. HOW TO BUILD THIS Group the document categories by business function (HR, finance, contracts, customer data, IT/security logs) since retention logic and applicable rules genuinely differ by function, and a single flat schedule across all categories usually signals nobody thought about the differences. For each category, state the business reason for keeping it at all (operational need, audit trail, historical reference) separately from any legal retention reason, since these can point to different lengths and conflating them hides which one is actually driving a given number. Where I've told you a current practice (e.g. "we currently keep invoices 7 years"), note whether it appears to be based on an actual confirmed legal requirement, a rule of thumb someone adopted, or unclear origin — flag "unclear origin" honestly rather than assuming it was set correctly. For every category, state clearly: "legal-minimum retention period: TO BE CONFIRMED BY COUNSEL" rather than asserting a specific number from general knowledge, since retention requirements vary by document type, industry, and jurisdiction and change over time. Cross-reference any category currently under a legal hold and flag it as exempt from normal disposal timing regardless of what schedule number eventually gets set, since a legal hold overrides any retention schedule until it's lifted. WHAT NOT TO DO Do not state a specific number of years as a legal requirement for any document category — every legal-minimum field must say "to be confirmed by counsel," with no exceptions, even for document types where a common retention period is widely known informally, because informally common is not the same as legally verified for this organization's specific situation. Do not recommend disposal of anything currently flagged under a legal hold, under any circumstance. OUTPUT FORMAT A table grouped by business function: Document Category | Business Reason to Retain | Current Practice (if stated) | Origin of Current Practice (confirmed / rule-of-thumb / unclear) | Legal-Minimum Retention (TO BE CONFIRMED BY COUNSEL) | Legal Hold Status. Close with a summary of which categories most urgently need actual legal confirmation given any known pending matters, and a statement that this schedule is a draft organizational framework only, not a legally accurate retention schedule, and must be reviewed and populated with confirmed retention periods by a qualified lawyer before it is adopted or used to guide any document disposal.
Customize
Optional — swap in your own details for the highlighted parts above.
Why this works
The absolute rule that every legal-minimum retention field reads 'to be confirmed by counsel,' with no exception even for document types where a period like 'seven years for financial records' is widely known informally, is the single most important guardrail in this prompt because retention periods are exactly the kind of fact GPT-5.1 can state with high, unwarranted confidence — these numbers genuinely are common across many organizations, which makes a plausible-sounding assertion frequently correct by coincidence, and that occasional correctness is precisely what makes an unconfirmed number dangerous: a reviewer who sees it hold up twice stops checking the third time, when this specific organization's actual jurisdiction, industry, or contractual obligations require something different. Separating business reason to retain from legal reason to retain, and flagging the origin of current practice as confirmed, rule-of-thumb, or unclear, targets a very common organizational blind spot: retention practices that started as someone's reasonable guess years ago calcify into 'the policy' simply through repetition, and by the time anyone tries to formalize a schedule, nobody can distinguish an actually-confirmed legal requirement from an inherited habit — making the model surface that distinction explicitly, rather than smoothing all current practices into a single confident-sounding table, is what turns this into a genuinely useful audit of existing assumptions rather than a rubber stamp on them. The absolute, no-exceptions rule against recommending disposal of anything under a legal hold exists because a litigation hold is a preservation obligation that overrides any retention schedule by design, and a mistake here — even one flowing from a plausible-sounding schedule an AI produced — could constitute actual spoliation of evidence with real legal consequences, which is categorically different in severity from every other kind of error a retention-schedule draft could contain, and is why this is the one instruction in the prompt stated with zero conditional language.
What you get back
CATEGORY: Accounts payable invoices. BUSINESS REASON TO RETAIN: Audit trail, dispute resolution with vendors. CURRENT PRACTICE: 7 years. ORIGIN: Rule-of-thumb, no one currently recalls a specific confirmed requirement. LEGAL-MINIMUM RETENTION: TO BE CONFIRMED BY COUNSEL. LEGAL HOLD STATUS: Not applicable. CATEGORY: Jensen contract dispute records. LEGAL HOLD STATUS: ACTIVE HOLD since March 2026 — exempt from any disposal regardless of schedule. This schedule is a draft organizational framework only — a qualified lawyer must review and populate confirmed retention periods before it is adopted or used to guide disposal.
Verified against
ChatGPT GPT-5.1 · 2026-08-14
Changelog
- 2026-08-14 — Initial publish, verified against ChatGPT GPT-5.1.
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