Comments on: Turning over the e-mail

By: Skepticseye.com by Allison Hayward

Skepticseye.com by Allison Hayward — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 09:07:05 +0000

E-Mail as Its Own WMD

Overlawyered had a good post yesterday reminding us all of the hazards of email.
But it’s not just the message – its the attachments. Don’t email Word documents with lots of embarassing metadata. Here’s a helpful post on that po…

By: Wikstrom

Wikstrom — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 16:29:12 +0000

…this e-mail issue is, of course, merely a symptom of the failed American experiment in expansive pretrial ‘Discovery’, initiated by the Federal government in 1938.

This oppressive ‘Discovery’ process has enriched many lawyers… and harmed many an innocent citizen.

‘Discovery’ is a powerful weapon for imposing expense & hardship on an opponent. Plaintiffs and defendants with frivolous cases often use either discovery, or the threat of it, to circumvent justice.

No other country has adopted American-style ‘Discovery’ …. and America got along fine without it for most of its history.

By: Walter E. Wallis

Walter E. Wallis — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 16:11:35 +0000

This is the same country that insists on the right of terrorists to privacy in their communications.

By: Deoxy

Deoxy — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 09:50:03 +0000

After merging from a small, stand-alone company into a small-but-part-of-a-stupendously-large company, I’ve heard a lot about document retention and document destruction.

Basically, there is now a significant amount of effort (costing no small sum of money, I assure you) to making sure that every document (including backup copies of every email) is kept exactly as long as required – no more, no less. If it’s required, it MUST be kept. If it’s not required, it MUST be destroyed immediately.

These kinds of legalities are the entire reason behind that. It costs the world at least tens of millions of dollars a year, probably quite a lot more. Ain’t it great?

By: Ted

Ted — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:54:44 +0000

Your employer may not be deleting your e-mail, even when it disappears from your personal in-box. Large corporations frequently have court orders requiring the preservation of e-mail because of pending litigation; Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC, and FERC regulations require many other firms to archive e-mail. If you recall, Arthur Andersen was decapitated by the allegation that it encouraged compliance with a pre-existing document-destruction policy, which has also changed corporate attitudes about document destruction.

By: Bob Smith

Bob Smith — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:33:55 +0000

Does this imply an obligation to save all of one’s email so it can later be used against you in discovery? I regularly delete all email once it has served its purpose, which is usually no more than a few days after receipt.