Electronic storm

The impact of the widespread use of e-mail over the last 15 years is well known to litigators and courts alike. E-mail exchanges have come to provide a vivid minute-by-minute contemporaneous record of relevant events which allows courts to reconstruct who said what to whom and when in a way that once could only be hazily or contentiously reconstructed from later oral evidence. Lawyers and courts are well used to the disclosure and review of metadata to assist with questions of who drafted what aspects of documents and when. Further, e-mail forms part of the tsunami of electronic documentation which has fundamentally altered the extent, cost of and approach to, disclosure.

Fixed with knowledge

An issue of increasing concern to business people inundated with e-mails is the presumption that they have read any e-mail that is delivered to their inbox, and the worry that they will later be fixed with knowledge of a particular matter as a result of being copied into an e-mail they