Careful With Those Emails

July 20th, 2012 by JBWK

Email is a great way to connect easily, but it’s also a great way to find out everything you have said. And if you don’t want someone else reading it, you probably shouldn’t be writing it.

Case in point: a recent age discrimination and FMLA case from a federal trial court in Roanoke. Before firing the employee, several supervisors discussed over email how easily the new performance standards could “trip up” the employee and then talked about “scrubbing” his file before firing him because of the sensitive information.

Guess what the employee got ahold of during discovery in his lawsuit? Copies of all those emails. A good rule of thumb: if you don’t want it quoted in a judicial opinion, don’t write it down.

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