How long trust records have to be kept

Ten years plus the current one, with one exception

By-Law 9 sets retention periods per record rather than one blanket period, and the Law Society's own summary of the record-keeping requirements sets them out record by record. Most of the trust set runs to ten years plus the current year:

• Trust receipts and disbursements journals — ten years plus current.
• The client trust ledger — ten years plus current.
• The valuable property record — ten years plus current.
• Bank statements or pass books, cleared cheque images and detailed duplicate deposit slips, for trust and general accounts — ten years plus current.
• Signed electronic trust transfer requisitions in Form 9A, and the signed printed confirmations of those transfers — ten years plus current.
• The trust-to-trust transfer journal — six years plus current.

Kept is not the same as current

Retention answers how long, not how. By-Law 9 separately requires the financial records to be entered and posted so as to be current at all times. A complete set of records assembled quarterly satisfies retention and still fails this, because the requirement is about the state the books are in as the practice runs, not the state they can be brought into afterwards.

That is the same reason reconstruction is conspicuous in a records review. The reviewer is not only asking whether a document exists; they are asking whether it existed at the time it says it did.

Electronic records carry an extra condition

Records may be kept by hand or by mechanical or electronic means. Kept by hand, they are to be entered and posted in ink. Kept electronically, there is an additional requirement that is easy to overlook: the licensee must ensure a paper copy of the record can be produced promptly at the Law Society's request.

That condition is worth testing before anyone asks. Software that displays a ledger beautifully on screen but cannot export or print a specific client's ledger for a specific period does not meet it, and discovering that during a review is a poor time to find out.

Before destroying anything

Retention periods are a floor, not an instruction to destroy on the anniversary. Other reasons to keep a file often outlast the by-law period — a limitation period still running, an undertaking not yet satisfied, a matter that could be reopened, or an insurer's expectations.

The safe order is to confirm the by-law period has run, confirm nothing else requires the file, and record what was destroyed and when. A destruction log is unglamorous and costs nothing until the one occasion it is the only evidence that a file was disposed of properly rather than lost.