What Happens When Your Records Provider Closes Its Doors

53 Years of Service—Then Silence

For more than half a century, companies like King Information Systems served their clients with unwavering dedication. Based in New England, King built its reputation on reliability, discretion, and a handshake-level trust that kept municipalities, law firms, financial institutions, and healthcare providers coming back year after year. For 53 years, they stored, managed, and protected records for organizations across New England and New York.

Then, seemingly overnight, they were gone.

King's story is not unique. Across the records management industry, long-standing providers have closed their doors in recent years—not because they lost clients, but because they never evolved. The systems that worked in 1980 were still running in 2020. The processes that were adequate when records were simple became liabilities as compliance requirements grew more complex. And the leadership that built these companies often assumed that loyalty alone would sustain the business indefinitely.

The Pattern: Loyal Service Without Strategic Investment

The companies that fail in records management tend to share a common profile. They have deep client relationships, decades of institutional knowledge, and a service culture that genuinely cares about the work. What they lack is investment in the infrastructure, technology, and processes that would carry them—and their clients—into the future.

Consider what "modernization" means in this industry:

• Technology: Moving from paper-based tracking to cloud-based inventory management systems that give clients real-time access to their records
• Compliance: Building retention policy frameworks that adapt to changing federal, state, and industry regulations rather than relying on static schedules
• Security: Implementing NAID AAA-certified destruction processes, role-based access controls, and documented chain-of-custody protocols
• Continuity: Establishing redundant systems, disaster recovery plans, and succession strategies that outlast any single owner or operator

Companies like King excelled at the service itself—they were dependable stewards of their clients' most sensitive records. But dependable service without forward-looking infrastructure is a ticking clock. Eventually, the operational model becomes unsustainable, and the company that everyone trusted simply ceases to exist.

What Clients Face When a Provider Closes

When a records management provider shuts down, the immediate impact on clients is severe:

Access disruption. Records that were retrievable yesterday are suddenly locked behind a closed facility. Municipalities can't respond to public records requests. Law firms can't produce discovery documents. Healthcare providers can't access patient histories. The records aren't lost, but they might as well be.

Compliance exposure. If your retention policy was managed by your provider, you may not even know what's due for destruction, what's under legal hold, or what's approaching its retention deadline. Regulators don't pause enforcement because your vendor went under.

Scramble for alternatives. Finding a new provider on an emergency timeline means accepting whoever is available, not necessarily who is best. The transition is chaotic—boxes get miscounted, indexes are incomplete, and the detailed institutional knowledge your previous provider carried in their heads walks out the door with them.

Hidden costs. Emergency retrieval fees, expedited transport, re-indexing, and the staff time spent managing the crisis all add up fast. What should have been a planned transition becomes a budget emergency.

Why This Keeps Happening

The records management industry has an unusual dynamic: client inertia is extraordinarily high. Once an organization places its records with a provider, the switching costs—both financial and operational—make it unlikely they'll leave. This creates a dangerous comfort zone for providers. Revenue is predictable. Client relationships feel permanent. And the urgency to invest in new systems, new technology, and new processes simply never materializes.

For decades, this model worked. But the regulatory environment has changed dramatically. Compliance requirements are more granular. Audit expectations are higher. Clients need real-time access to their records, not a phone call followed by a two-day retrieval window. And the workforce that built these legacy companies is aging out, with no succession plan and no documented processes to transfer.

What LRG Learned from This History

Legacy Retention Group was built by people who lived through this cycle. Several members of our team came directly from King Information Systems—they experienced firsthand what happens when a company serves loyally for decades but never invests in its own future. That experience shaped every decision we've made about how LRG operates.

Our cloud-based LRG+ platform exists specifically because we watched clients lose access to their records when legacy systems failed. LRG+ gives every client browser-based, real-time access to their complete records inventory—not as a premium add-on, but as a fundamental part of the service. If something ever happened to our physical operations, your data is still yours, still accessible, and still secure.

Our retention policy development process is built to be transferable. Every policy we create is documented, client-owned, and designed to survive any transition. Your retention schedule isn't stored in someone's head—it's codified in a system that belongs to you.

And our organizational structure—backed by DataMerj, Inc. and Valley Green Shredding, companies with over 15 years of operational history—provides the financial stability and succession planning that single-operator businesses simply can't offer.

Questions to Ask Your Current Provider

Whether you work with LRG or another provider, these are the questions every organization should be asking:

• Do I have real-time access to my records inventory, or do I have to call and wait?
• Is my retention policy documented and in my possession, or does it live only in my provider's systems?
• What is my provider's succession plan if the owner retires or the business closes?
• When was the last time my provider upgraded their technology or processes?
• Is my provider NAID AAA certified, and can they produce current documentation of that certification?
• Can I get a complete chain-of-custody report for any record at any time?

If the answers to these questions make you uncomfortable, that discomfort is a signal. The best time to evaluate your records management partner is before there's a crisis—not after.