Your email footer is ridiculous and is taking up valuable space on my screen. Your company legal department requires that its appended to every email. The IT department is automating the footer so you can’t do anything about it. I can delete it when I forward it to someone, then when they forward it and no one downstream knows about the disclaimer. How do you track all this, fact is you can’t. The company is trying to limit liability and comply with federal and international laws. Is this ever really enforced? Everyone does the email ‘disclaimer’, there are even websites dedicated to helping you understand why (?) < Email Disclaimer dot com >

At one company I worked for we did it just because everyone else was doing it, so basically the lemming effect. In reality it just seems like extra bits that take up space and it brings up the following questions:

• Can attorneys limit the use of eDiscovery in litigation because of the disclaimer?
• How do you know if your email was forwarded?
• What can you do about it?

If you have answers to these questions or just agree that its annoying and not an effective way to control or manage dissemination of sensitive information let us know. Our opinion is you shouldn’t be emailing files around anyway, you should use a real collaboration tool.

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