General Counsel to Employees: Think Before You Send

Katheryn Hayes Tucker
Fulton County Daily Report

E-discovery rules have caused in-house counsel to take a harder line with some of the e-mails that workers think are private

“Don’t put this in writing, but … ” Those are the opening words of an e-mail that got the writer’s company in legal hot water. And there are plenty more where that came from.

“This is off the record,” started the e-mail that in fact put it all on the record.

How about this one? “We may be in breach of contract, and here’s why.”

These examples of troublesome e-mails general counsel say they’ve run across don’t include the countless off color so-called jokes forwarded to contact lists of colleagues, interested or not, or links to Web sites that are definitely not part of a corporate job description.

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