Busted by Email
Emailing from your company email account is not as innocent as it once was. From the Pacific Business Journal:
It’s not just the potential for litigation when someone sends an offensive e-mail. Every angry customer, frustrated competitor and spurned employee now knows that e-mail provides a retrievable trail of evidence…
In federal bankruptcy court in Honolulu last fall, the former chief financial officer of Mesa Air Group was tripped up by an e-mail he wrote that said Mesa didn’t want to wait for Aloha Airlines “to die, rather we should be the ones who give them the last push.”… The e-mail was part of the evidence that helped the judge rule against Mesa, which ultimately led it to settle its lawsuit with Hawaiian Airlines for $52.5 million.
The most expensive case involving so-called “electronic discovery” was the …case of Laura Zubulake against …UBS Warburg in 2003…Zubulake, who was an executive with the bank’s Asian equities sales desk, sued the bank … for sex discrimination when a male manager told her she was “old and ugly and she can’t do the job.” A jury awarded Zubulake $29 million when it was learned the supervisor covered up the incident by deleting e-mails…
In each of these instances, the person in authority displayed an attitude of “Captainitis”, where they thought since they had more power, that nothing would come of their insensitive statements. They may have thought that they had the undying loyalty of those that reported to them. It may have been inconceivable to them that they would be punished, much less get caught.
I don’t think there is a question about what they said or what we thought we heard. The courts proved that.
Tags: communications, email, lawsuits, Pacific Business Journal