Today I have been wondering about the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. Sections 2510-2521 as it relates to free e-mail services such as yahoo, gmail, etc. Many attorney e-mails end with a threatening footer such as
Information contained in this e-mail transmission may be privileged, confidential and covered by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. Sections 2510-2521. If you are not the addressee, note that any disclosure, copying, distribution, or use of the contents of this message is prohibited. If you have received this transmission in error, please destroy it and notify us immediately at *****.
Is this just pompous posturing when attached to a free e-mail service? I located the following article "A User's Guide to the Stored Communications Act" by Kerr (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=421860) that seems to touch on many of my concerns.
Originally I began researching this issue when confronted when I received e-mails with footers such as above and the content was entirely unrelated to legal work product. I wonder how much more we could get done if people focused less on appearing powerful/important and more on being powerful/important.
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