Delete Is a Myth: ESI, Data Preservation, and Attorney Client Privilege with Tom O'Connor

Hey, everybody.

What do you got?

Welcome back from the National, uh, Safety Council's, uh, Congress and Expo.

I did not get to go this year, but a lot of my friends did, and they said it was a great time.

But as always, uh, at NSC, they reveal OSHA's top 10 most frequently cited standards again this year.

No surprise, for the 16th consecutive year, the number one most frequently cited, um, citation is...

What do you think it was, Dr. Martin?

Fall protection.

Fall protection.

Fall protection, yep.

Uh, followed by HAZCOM, lockout tagout, scaffolding, ladders, respiratory protection, uh, powered industrial trucks, fall protection training, PPE, eye and face protection, and machine guarding.

And what, what really surprises me, and it's not r- not so much a surprise, is this list never change.

The ranking changes a little bit.

Uh, interesting to see HAZCOM right up there under fall protection at number two this year, uh, from a construction standpoint, the construction standard HAZCOM.

But it's the same stuff every year.

And, um, there were some interesting comments made during the conference, um, by the acting deputy director of OSHA's Directory of Enforcement, Trent Flynn, and he, he summed this all up to, "This is just a failure to manage the job.

Fall protection is not a novel issue.

There are a lot of reasons that fall protection systems are not used more.

The bottom line, as an employer, you have to have zero tolerance for failing to use fall protection.

It is the number one killer of construction workers, and we certainly reject arguments of 'I did not know about fall protection.'"

Well, I mean, I, I, I think "I did not know" might be the good excuse, right? But I, I, I also think that, um, failure to use fall protection, at least from my, uh, background, as you know, I do a lot of construction jobs, is, uh, people get complacent, right? They know, they know about it, they just don't use it regularly, or it's just gonna take a second, or, uh, you know, "I'm never gonna go near that parapet wall, uh, so I don't need to put up the Garloks," right? I mean, so, uh, I, I would say it's, it's not that we don't know.

I think that it's, it's we kinda get to the point where we're thinking, "We don't really need it.

I've done this 1,000 times." Uh, the job has changed.

We, we get complacent with how we do things and, and we just, we don't do it right.

You know, and that kind of brings us to our topic today of what did the company know, when did they know it, and what did they do about it? Because once we enter into worker injuries, worker fatalities, again, fall protection, uh, uh, not, not, not the lack of fall protection, but falls being the leading cause of death in the construction industry, now we're entering into the area where you and I practice as safety professionals, and our guest is an expert on OSHA investigations that often lead to litigation and wrongful death claims, gross negligence claims.