The Good and Bad News About E-Mail

The good news about e-mail is that it is a fast and responsive medium for communicating to partners, colleagues, friends and adversaries. The bad news is that it is a fast and responsive medium for communicating to those same parties. Why is it that we see so many problems with employees sending e-mail in the work place where they have this inherent belief that all messages sent from their computer are private, even an e-mail to their attorney regarding litigation with their employer?

It comes down policy and training, or lack thereof. Every law office, whether small, medium or large, needs a computer use policy that addresses e-mail in the work place. Specifically, a policy should inform employees that e-mail is a business asset, like the photocopy machine, and it should be used for business purposes. And furthermore, that employees have no inherent right to privacy in using their employer's assets.

As for training, three things. First, know that someone else might read that e-mail you send outside the corporate fire wall. Employees should know that e-mail sent to the outside world is insecure unless encrypted. Unencrypted e-mail is simply a text message that can be obtained by an untrusted third party at many points along the way between the sender and the recipient. It could be trapped by a stalled router waiting for an administrator, sniffed and copied by a competitor, or even filtered on another corporate e-mail system waiting to be reviewed by someone not a party to the message's address fields -- that's not to mention the fact that one or more of the recipients may forward your note to the planet or upload it to his or her blog.

Second, sending e-mail is fast -- faster than you or I can think, actually. Take a moment before clicking that send key and ask yourself if you would be embarassed to have your mother read the note. Of course, your mother could care less about the content of your note unless she happens to own the company, right? But seriously, review the note and filter out abusive language and upper case letters that make it appear as though you are shouting.

Third, if you have a tendency for knee-jerk reactions, configure your mailer to send mail once a day at the end of the business day or send it out periodically throughout the course of the day in timed increments -- anything but "immediate." That way, after you click the "send" key you will have a moment to reflect whether or not you should send that note and/or whether or not you should attach that document. And note that if your finger hurts after you click the send key, perhaps you should reflect on it sooner rather than later.