Judge: Your boss has no right to your emails held by a third party
Unless you've signed something. And they can find it
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Staff emails can’t just be accessed by a company whenever it feels like it, a UK High Court Judge has ruled, in what could be a guiding case on email privacy.
A marine transport company was trying to get access to the emails of a former chief executive, but Justice Edwards-Stuart ruled that the content of emails is not the firm’s property by default and so it can’t have them.
The case kicked off when Dutch-based Dockwise took over its rival Fairstar Heavy Transport in a hostile takeover in July this year. Once Dockwise got in the door though, it realised that Fairstar owed a hefty sum of money to a Chinese shipyard.
The company now claims that former CEO Philip Adkins, who resigned as soon as Dockwise moved in, never told the Dutch company about the debt in the run-up to the takeover. Dockwise took Adkins to court to try to get access to Adkins' emails to see what he had said about the debt and the takeover.
The whole thing was complicated by the fact that Adkins had been seconded by Dockwise from another company, Cadenza Management, which was actually his employer - so all of his emails had been forwarded from Fairstar’s servers to his Cadenza address.
Dockwise claims that Fairstar’s servers had deleted the emails when they sent them on to Adkins' other address, a claim that Adkins disagrees with.
Wherever the emails are located, the judge said they were not the property of Dockwise.
“There are no compelling practical reasons that support the existence of a proprietary right - indeed, practical considerations militate against it,” he said.
The only way that emails could belong to a firm is if they contained copyrighted material or confidential information or if the employee’s signed contract with the firm already said so.
“In my judgment it is clear that the preponderance of authority points strongly against there being any proprietary right in the content of information, and this must apply to the content of an email, although I would not go so far as to say that this is now settled law,” he added. ®
COMMENTS
Re: Is it just me?
The sticking point seems to be this:
"Adkins had been seconded by Dockwise from another company, Cadenza Management, which was actually his employer"
You can be certain that Cadenza Management had had Adkins sign the usual email clause with them. But that isn't the same as him signing with Fairstar Heavy Transport, even though he was working as their CEO. So Dockwise sue Cadenza Management to get access to one of Cadenza's employees emails. That gets pretty weird. If you are a contractor for a company, they don't automatically get access to your email account.
Re: Is it just me?
I think the point is that anything you put on the company network / email belongs to the company as per contract and reasonable sense. This seems to be a case where they're trying to get hold of a copy from externally because they deleted their own copy.
Perhaps they could argue that the copy is theirs due to intellectual property rights, same as a photocopy would be, but in that case I'd think he could just delete the mails as it isn't his responsibility to keep them.
emails deleted.
Why don't more people think of that?
I'm not promoting getting up to dodgy stuff, in personal, commercial or political life, but I've always been amazed when those that do blatantly leave the evidence lying around, either electronically or on paper.
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