Litera webinar: How Shell transformed records governance from back office function to business backbone
Records governance used to be about managing boxes. Now it’s about proving what you kept, what you destroyed, and why — across an entire enterprise, on demand.
For information governance and records teams, retention schedules, privacy obligations, preservation holds, and subject access requests no longer live in separate lanes. They converge the moment an auditor, regulator, or legal event asks a single question: where is this record, and can you defend how it was handled?
Shell faced that challenge at scale, approximately four million physical records spanning upstream, downstream, and corporate functions, stored onsite and offsite. In this session, Debra Mestemaker, Downstream Business IM Manager – Shell and Ian Roelofsz, Product Manager – Shell, share how their team modernized records governance to support retention, preservation holds, defensible disposition, and privacy workflows including right to be forgotten responses, all on a single platform.
This session will walk you through the lessons that shaped a program built to hold up under scrutiny:
- Data mapping is foundational: implementation success depends on how well legacy data is carried into the new system
- Simpler data models win: search, adoption, and defensibility all improve when the structure stays clean rather than clever
- Governance is operational compliance: preservation holds, privacy requests, retention enforcement, and defensible destruction as connected workflows, not disconnected tasks
- Design for the occasional user: a bulk upload process built with IT and the FileTrail team lets business users contribute records accurately, without becoming power users
Shell relies on FileTrail, part of the Litera Governance portfolio, for enterprise records governance. Built on 30 years of legal and records expertise no other vendor can shortcut, Litera unifies retention, privacy, and disposition into one auditable system of record, so governance teams can stand behind every output, not just move faster.
From Back Office to Backbone: How Shell Modernised Records Governance
Webinar: Thursday 1st Oct 2026 4:00 PM BST
Register here
