“Documents are like diamonds. They are very precious. And they (like hard-drive content) last forever.” This was one of the take-away gems delivered by keynoter Nancy Singer at last month’s Medical Silicone Conference, presented by Medical Design in Minneapolis. (For more on MSC, see News Watch, page12.)

Before founding Arlington, VA-based Compliance-Alliance LLC, Singer was a U.S. Department of Justice attorney and then AdvaMed’s Special Counsel. She’s also a former inner city school teacher and was a commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve. She knows the legal system and how to keep an audience’s attention.

“Please let everyone know that after the break they will need to fill up all of the seats in the tables towards the front of the room, because what I do requires the attendees to participate in teams and solve problems,” Singer told me just before I was to make some announcements. Ah yes, nothing like telling everyone at the end of a full day of conference sessions that not only are they expected to stay for the final session, but they better be ready to work as well.

Singer captivated the audience with a combination of wit and real-life courtroom stories stemming from her experience as a prosecutor before switching sides and becoming a defense lawyer, and then spending much of her career as counsel for AdvaMed. She engaged her audience with probing questions, slides showing inappropriate emails from employees of leading drug and device firms, and challenging tasks. One task involved asking each team to rewrite sentences that could be damaging in the hands of a plaintiff’s lawyer. A design engineer, for example, might send the following: If we stay late tonight, we can use the shredder and get rid of the documents. Such an email could be used to imply unethical behavior. However, the same engineer could communicate the same message in a much safer way: If we stay late, we can use the shredder and implement our document retention policy that tells us every six months we need to go through our files and get rid of draft minutes and memos, irrelevant handwritten notes, and outdated correspondence that are cluttering up the offices and causing a fire hazard.”

Does your firm have a document retention policy? Or training sessions on appropriate communication— both email and verbal? Do your company’s core values even include mention of appropriate communication and what it is?

I believe that virtually all medical OEMs and their suppliers are committed to product quality and compliance with regulatory requirements.Don’t you? But when it comes to treating emails as diamonds, that’s a different matter. As one MSC attendee put it, “I don’t think I’ll write another email without thinking about [Nancy’s presentation] first.”