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Organizations consistently maintain copies of correspondence and memos. Far to usually, however, they cannot extend this exercise to mail correspondence. E-mail communication isn't any different your standard paperwork. You should keep copies of of it to guard your organization in just about any litigation.

Currently, only banks and broker-dealers are obliged to retain e-mail and instant messaging documents for 36 months under U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission regulations. Beginning July 2006, all public organizations may also be required to do this underneath the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Notwithstanding these regulations, your practice and custom must be to maintain copies of e-mail correspondence. Email is recognized as evidence and courts are working organizations that not preserve e-mail documents. Judges tend to be ruling that the failure to maintain and produce mail records means the business enterprise in question is hiding key evidence.

In the current Perelman v. Morgan Stanley lawsuit, a ruling on the failure of Morgan Stanley to make mail was important element in the issuance of a $1.45 billion award. On the basis of the failure to make email records, Judge Elizabeth Maass issued a pretrial ruling that effectively found Morgan Stanley conspired to defraud Perelman in a 1998 package. Morgan Stanley isn't the only real company defendant to possess this dilemma.

In the summer of 2004, UBS bank was observed by a judge to have willfully damaged mail evidence in a discrimination case. UBS was ordered to pay fees and a $29 million verdict was returned by a jury.

Email Policy

You'll want a procedure set up to keep up e-mail communications developed through the business, to safeguard your business. Failure to help keep these documents can result in rulings in litigation your company willfully destroyed evidence. If this does occur, the judge might issue major fiscal sanctions, quickly find you responsible or simply take other severe actions that guarantee a for the Plaintiff. Like such developments are not bad enough, there is a second risk connected with mail communications.

Maintaining e-mail communications, but, might have a disadvantage. The problem arises, needless to say, whenever a communication contains statements which are destructive to your company. Yes, the proverbial catch-22 situation.

Your company must train all employees to comply with that policy and produce a clear policy on e-mail communications, to avoid such disasters. Employees must comprehend the company environment is not one by which jokes, flippant remarks and the like ought to be made in email communications. division