E-Mail Policies

It's important for your firm to have an e-mail policy, and to follow it; many times, the fact that there is a policy and it's being followed, is a defense to claims that you're inappropriate with e-mail.

"Inappropriate" often means that you have a policy, follow it, and the opposition doesn't like that. Where I work, e-mail disappears in 90 days as a matter of course, decided in IT. Because the decision isn't based on any litigation, it's unlikely that the company could get into hot water for destruction; in this case, it isn't spoliation.

Another policy is to minimize putting things on e-mail unnecessarily; so often people e-mail, twitter and text, but could easily walk down the hall, or make a 30-second phone call. Memorializing the information electronically just makes more work in the long run as it creates a document.

Of all the document review projects on which I've worked, the first one had the most ridiculous, innocuous, non-responsive e-mails of the bunch. It was easy to move quickly through some batches as they were requests to assistants to subscribe to a magazine, order a new cellphone holster, order a new car charger, order a cd, and many other examples of information that was not truly personal but didn't have a purpose related to the lawsuit.