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Workplace e-mail: Employers risking lawsuits

E-mail is playing an increasingly important role in workplace lawsuits and regulatory investigations, but many employers are doing a poor job of managing their e-mail business records, according to a new survey of 1,100 employers.

     Conducted by the American Management Association, the ePolicy Institute and Clearswift, the survey reveals that 14% of respondents have been ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce employee e-mail, up from 9% two years ago; and one in 20 has faced a workplace lawsuit triggered by e-mail. Yet despite this growing scrutiny from courts and regulators, only 34% of employers have a written e-mail retention and deletion policy in place. That’s the same figure reported in 2001, 12 months before multi-million dollar fines were levied against several brokerage firms for failing to retain e-mail business records.

     On a positive note, the survey reveals that more employers are using technology to monitor e-mail content. Forty percent of respondents said they conduct key-word or key-phrase searches of e-mail or computer files, up from 24% in 2001. But although 90% of employers monitor incoming and outgoing e-mail, only 19% monitor internal e-mail among employees, a potentially costly oversight. Casual e-mail conversations among employees, according to the report, are exactly the type of messages that tend to trigger lawsuits.

     To access a copy of the 2003 E-Mail Rules, Policies and Practices Survey, go to www.amanet.org/research/pdfs/Email_Policies_Practices.pdf

 

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