[Gllug] Legal precedent for email disclaimers

[Bruce Richardson]

On Thu, May 27, 2004 at 12:21:41PM +0100, Tethys wrote:
> 
> Does anyone know of any legal precent for the validity or otherwise of
> email disclaimers? I'm not looking for the opinion of laymen here -- I've
> already tried that approach, and the legal people aren't having any of it,
> and without anything to back up my position, future email from me may well
> have 27 billion lines of legal boilerplate attached, a situation I'd rather
> avoid...

A legal dislaimer will be absolutely no protection in court unless you
can also show that your staff are both aware of the disclaimer and of
the e-mail usage policy that goes with it.  We do not have a disclaimer
but we do inform new staff of the existence of a policy and tell them
where to find it.  We are discussing with Personnel the possibility of
having it given to new staff along with their contract and that the
contract should have a clause to say "I am aware of computer use
policies and agree to follow them".

We are of the opinion that this offers us much more significant
protection than a disclaimer and I am quite sure that a disclaimer on
its own, with no other precautions, is a very flimsy figleaf.

-- 
Bruce

If the universe were simple enough to be understood, we would be too
simple to understand it.
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