Misdirected email; record retention, Selling your business and TS Eliot
This is a theme to which I keep returning – email (and other electronic records) is forever. At this point everyone has a horror story about the email that got sent to the wrong person or that had some embarrassing statement. The observation that email seems to inspire people with a freedom to say – whatever, has been made so many times that it can’t possibly bear repeating, can it? Well, despite the well know phenomena of misdirected email, embarrassing statements and etc., all these email faux pas seem to continue unabated.
Mostly it is just a nuisance when you send an email to the wrong person, and you get an email back the gist of which is "I don’t think this was intended for me." But, we recently had to deal with a situation in which a consulting firm that was doing work for two companies in related but potentially competitive businesses sent proprietary marketing information of one to the other. This was an autofill mistake. In the end, it turned out OK, and it almost always does, but … It seems like these types of errors are just part of life. I know one person who has turned off the autofill feature and another who dictates his emails and tells his assistant who to send them to. I can imagine a software product that guesses whether the autofill has what you intended based upon some comparison of content and other persons copied on the email. But, that probably would just further lull people into a false sense of security.
Record retention is another one. The government is hot on the trail of all sorts of regulation around record retention and data protection.. Our firm publishes a blog on that topic as well. I recently ran across two situations in which employers purport to delete old email records after a few weeks. I don’t know what the law requires or what our data protection group would advise, but deletion has at least these two consequences. First, when you need to do some investigation you don’t have all the data. That is, if you think something bad has happened and you erased the emails you may have trouble proving stuff. Second, it may turn out that someone else has preserved the record. Now, you may be able to get it through some legal process such as discovery, but that is a pain and takes time. You may find yourself disadvantaged by this delay (or you may be unable to get the emails for some reason.)
Keep in mind that when you sell the business, the buyer will own the company’s serves etc. If you have been using the business email etc. for personal stuff, they buyer will have easy access. Maybe you don’t care, but maybe you do.
T.S. Eliot said about literary criticism "the only method is to be very intelligent." With respect to this whole area of email, records etc., the only method is to be very careful.
