Watch what you write: don't let electronic communication come back to haunt you

摘要

You face a lawsuit over an accident. Your driver clearly made some mistakes, but the plaintiffs attorneys haven't found any basis for a negligence claim against your company. So settlement talks are under way. Then as part of the discovery process, a computer forensics expert unearths a deleted e-mail exchange on the day of the accident between your operations manager and the driver's dispatcher to the effect that the driver wasn't feeling well, but it was a "hot load" so he needed to take it. Uh-oh. It turns out that the e-mail exchange wasn't deleted until after the lawsuit was filed. Big uh-oh.