Richards and Richards Office Records Management

Richards & Richards has been a trusted name in Records and Information Management Services in Nashville for 23 years and we are your single source for all your Records and Information Management needs. Unlike other companies in the area, we focus on traditional records management services to include records storage, off-site data protection, secure shredding for paper, magnetic media destruction, computer hard drive destruction, e-vaulting, copy and imaging services.

Our highly trained staff of Records and Information Management professionals will help you identify, organize, maintain and access needed information and securely destroy the rest, while realizing the benefits in cost savings, efficiency, regulatory compliance and reduced litigation risk.

Many of Nashville's largest law firms, hospitals, banks, financial service providers, government institutions, accounting firms and corporations depend on Richards & Richards to store and manage their records. With more than 1,600 clients storing their records in our 251,000 square foot records center, Richards & Richards is the oldest and largest, single market, independently owned and operated records management company in the state of Tennessee.

At Richards & Richards, your peace of mind means everything. For that reason, we offer every new client our Guarantee: If, at the end of six months, for any reason you are not satisfied with our service, we will return your records at no charge. No strings attached. No other storage provider offers this guarantee. No other provider will serve you better. For the life of your records, you can trust Richards & Richards. Richards & Richards is dedicated to providing our clients with uncompromising customer satisfaction and creating extraordinary value in records and information management solutions. Our exceptional customer service is a result of our commitment to our employees and their determination to satisfy our clients.

We have a long and distinguished history in the records management industry as one of the first commercial records centers in America to utilize bar coding in every aspect of the operation of the records center.

Richards & Richards was previously chosen by the Nashville Business Journal as the Small Business of the Year. We were chosen twice by the Tennessean and the Chamber of Commerce as a Future 50 Company, designating us as one of the fastest growing companies in Middle Tennessee. We were also chosen by Inc. Magazine as one of the Inc. 500, designating Richards & Richards as one of the fastest growing privately owned corporations in America. We are very proud of these honors and are conscious of the fact that we must continually maintain high business standards because of the honors we have received.

Services we offer:

Off-site Records & Document Storage:

Are files piling up on your desk? Are your filing cabinets overflowing?

Do you need more office space because you are running out of space to store your documents?

We can store your documents at our facility for a fraction of the price of expensive office real estate. Richards & Richards has thousands of square feet in our building on Elm Hill Pike just waiting to help you meet your needs and your bottom line.

Secure Shredding:

How secure are your documents?

Your records are safer in our Storage Center than they are in your office. We have a 251,000-square-foot site near the heart of downtown Nashville. All entrances are secure at all times, visitors must be accompanied signing in and out, and our building is protected by state of the art fire, water and security systems.

Every employee, as a condition of employment, must submit to a thorough background check for every municipality they have resided for the previous seven (7) years. Additionally each employee must submit to an annual, random drug test and they must sign a confidentiality agreement, employment agreement and be fingerprinted by the Metro Police Department (for FBI and TBI clearance.) No other records management company in Nashville goes to this level regarding employee background checks and security.

 

Secure Shredding is more than just a convenience. How your documents are handled is extremely important to the security of your business and it's clients. What happens to your documents when they leave your office?

Richards & Richards has the largest commercial paper shredding operation in the state of Tennessee. We have an Amerishred AMS125 shredder and baler and we have the ability to securely and confidentially shred 16,000 pounds of paper per hour. We provide security bins to place throughout your office to collect confidential paper, and we pickup on a schedule selected by you. A notarized Certificate of Destruction is provided.

We handle:

 

• One-time large and small volume document purges
• On-going regular secure shredding services
• Hard drive and magnetic media destruction




Our secure shredding services include a full chain of custody, destruction by the highest industry standards, security of your shredded documents until they are processed at the paper mill, as well as consistent and ethical business practices.

Full Chain of Custody

Your confidential information is placed in a locked, secured container in your office. Upon scheduled or requested pick-up, your documents are transferred to another locked container and we scan the barcode for both containers. At this point we begin a fully auditable and trackable chain of custody for your documents.

All documents are transferred to a secured and locked vehicle for transport to our secured facility. Our vehicles are secure and tracked by GPS so we know where they are, where they've been and how fast they've been travelling.

Your documents are received at our secure facility, and prepared for the shredding process. Every employee, as a condition of employment, must submit to a thorough background check for every municipality they have resided for the previous seven (7) years. Additionally each employee must submit to an annual, random drug test and they must sign a confidentiality agreement, employment agreement and be fingerprinted by the Metro Police Department (for FBI and TBI clearance.) No other records management company in Nashville goes to this level regarding employee background checks and security.

Your confidential information is securely shredded and compressed into large bales of paper. The bales are processed into recycled paper products at domestic paper mills. You receive a Certificate of Destruction verifying the destruction of your confidential paper.

Every step of the process is tracked and recorded so we can verify a full chain of custody of your documents from your office to the paper mill.

Destruction by the Highest Industry Standards

We are the only AAA NAID Certified shredding company in Nashville for plant-based operations for paper, magnetic media and computer hard drives. This is the highest level of security offered in the industry and means that our entire company (facility, equipment, process, procedures and employees) is certified by an independent, outside auditor. (www.naidonline.org) Additionally, we are the only shredding company in the State of Tennessee that is certified by the Metro Police Department for Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confidential paper shredding.

We choose to use plant-based shredding for your security. By NAID standards, we must pass an additional 17 audit points to meet this standard over the on-site trucks. Our shredding process is recorded to video and stored for 90 days. We are in a climate-controlled environment, eliminating complications from wind, rain and other elements.

Security of Your Shredded Documents

Your confidential information is securely converted into large bales of paper. The bales are processed into recycled paper products at domestic paper mills. We never sell bales to a recycler. Recyclers are not set up with proper security - many times your shredded documents are left on loading docks waiting for pick-up by the highest bidder. We sell directly to domestic paper mills, this ensures that your documents are transferred into a locked vehicle and kept secure until they are processed for pulping into recycled products.

Why is this important? Advanced scanning technology has generated companies completely devoted to reconstructing shredded documents. These companies can put back together paper that has been shredded into confetti size pieces in a matter of minutes. So in reality, your documents have not been secured until they have been processed for reuse. That is why Richards & Richards takes extreme care in how your paper is handled until that point.

Consistent and Ethical Business Practices

Richards & Richards has been a trusted name in Records and Information Management Services in Nashville for 23 years. With more than 1,600 clients storing their records in our 251,000 square foot records center, Richards & Richards is the oldest and largest, single market, independently owned and operated records management company in the state of Tennessee.

Like many industries, the document destruction industry is under mass consolidation. Ask your prospective provider what their long-term plans are. For example, the company you reach an agreement with may not be the same company you do business with months later.

Does the company have the capable equipment for your volume? Also, is the company properly staffed to handle your volume? How many employees does the company have available to service you, should you have a large project?

Data Vault:

Did anyone change the back-up tape or hard drive recently? Is your backup media sitting in an environment that is climate-controlled and secured? Are you confident that your company's computer back-up tape and information is safe?

Consistency

Security

Climate-Controlled

Our Data Vault temperature and humidity levels are tightly monitored and controlled to keep your tapes at the best possible conditions to prevent data loss. Magnetic tape is fragile and needs to be delicately handled to prevent corruption. Eliminate these kinds of risks by storing your mission critical infromation in an environment specially created for these materials.

 

Electronic Vaulting:

Do you need a more cost effective solution for backing up your data? Do you wish you could retrieve an individual file quickly without searching through a backup tape?

Electronic vaulting, or online backup is a secure, reliable, disciplined method by which a company's mission critical data is backed up via the Internet or dedicated transmission line to a remote server in a highly secure regional data center.

Utilizing industry-leading software, our service recognizes and captures changes to files since the last backup session, strips out only the changes from the files (at the block level), encrypts the data for enhanced security, and compresses it to minimize transmission time. The encrypted data is then sent over the Internet or private telecommunication lines to highly secure offsite regional data center.

Customers schedule automated, unattended backup sessions according to their own needs. Since the only segments of the data that are sent are the portions that have changed since the last backup, even in the highly unlikely event of someone being able to break into the code, they would find a few unintelligible bits of data - as opposed to an entire file, which is the common occurrence with tape backup.

You push the data to us so we don't see it nor can we manipulate it in any way. You have the only software key. It is secure since you can choose encryption prior to pushing the data to our vault. It is compressed prior to sending the data, typically 2 to 1, unless you have image files, which do not compress. We support open files with Open File Manager software. You get an e-mail daily telling you your files were successfully backed up and the listings of your files.

Retrievals can be accomplished online, realtime from the customer's place of business or remotely.

Your invoice is based on compressed amount of data, and what is stored on our vault in terms of gigabytes, at the end of a month. There is no maximum number of gigabytes you are allowed to store. You can control the cost by not backing up your operating system or application shell and by backing up only your mission critical files and controlling your own retention schedule.