The key to a defensible system of e-mail monitoring is the creation of a comprehensive and communicated computer use policy. That is apparently as true in Canada as it in the United States. Brian Bowman and Andrew Buck put together an excellent privacy primer on Monitoring employee e-mail: a privacy primer. In what situations is e-mail...
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Back in April, I mentioned a New Jersey case that found e-mail, sent during work hours on a company computer, was not protected by the attorney-client privilege: Compliance Policies and Email (Stengart v. Loving Care ) That case has now been overturned. It seems that a company’s policy on computer use may be more...
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One of the problems with collaboration between law firms and their clients is that too much of it happens through email. Email is fast, allows you to send the same message to lots of people, and is inexpensive. But it is still a set of messages sent back and forth, much like the Pony Express....
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You should take a look at your computer use and email policies to see how they address three recent cases involving email in the workplace. The first case involves unauthorized acces: (Van Alstyne v. Electronic Scriptorium, Inc.).  The president of the company had broken into an employee’s personal AOL email account. The employee had occasionally...
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LiveOffice presented a webinar on records management issues related to electronic correspondence and archiving. (I missed the Email Compliance 101 session.) First up was  Christina Rovira, Legal Compliance Advisor at CoreCompliance & Legal Services, Inc. She pointed out that SEC and FINRA require investment advisers and broker-dealers to supervise the business activities of their representatives....
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Molly McDonough of the ABA Journal puts together a list of things you should never put in an email, borrowing from Roger Matus‘ 10 Things Never To Put In Email: “I could get into trouble for telling you this, but…” “Delete this email immediately.” “I really shouldn’t put this in writing.” “Don’t tell So-and-So.” Or, “Don’t send this...
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Lots of hallway conversations have turned into email and instant messaging conversations. There are lots of problems with that. First, is just the lack of human interaction. Humans are social and need to meet face-to-face. Along with that is the limited ability to add tone, sarcasm and other elements of conversation into the written word. The...
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