Litigation

Who's Reading Your Email? Whose Email Are You Reading?

By Evan Schaeffer

If you work for a large organization, you might find this article a little creepy. "What your emails say about you: Our electronic trails are powerfully revealing ? for those who can decode them."

Although the article has only a cursory relation to the topic of this weblog -- it mentions e-discovery --  it might be relevant to lawyers for other reasons. The article profiles a company called Cataphora that "tries to model what an 'effective' employee looks like based upon her electronic trail." For example, Cataphora can look for "who's using all-caps (typically a sign of high emotion) or who is communicating with people on a distant part of the org chart ? a relationship that makes no organizational sense."

And there are some law-related applications:

Over the years, Cataphora has helped out in many cases where it's useful to know whether an employee is thriving within the company. This may indicate whether he will be a co-operative witness. Or take the example of a whistle-blower. While it's against the law to conduct a witch-hunt and fire the whistle-blower, it's very advantageous to know, before you get into court, who the whistle-blower may be (i.e., is it someone in a position to give a lot of information to the government?). When dealing with these kinds of issues, Cataphora started with the basic tradecraft assumption that a happy employee is unlikely to cause problems.

Want to know more? Here's a link to Cataphora's website.

Full post as published by The Illinois Trial Practice Blog on September 17, 2009 (boomark / email).