The VLW Blog

A woman whose boss accessed her personal e-mail account from points all over the globe cannot collect her damage and attorney’s fee awards totaling more than $410,000, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said yesterday.
Bonnie Van Alstyne sued her boss and his company, a small data-conversion firm in Leesburg, for sexual harassment. The company [...]

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Spam, i.e., unwanted e-mail, won’t go away. At least the spammers are getting funnier.
Check out your spam filter some time to see what’s been blocked. Use the same care and caution you’d use when opening a full trash can that’s been sitting out in the summer sun a few days. You can’t be sure what’s [...]

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A tourism PR director who says he was fired for sending e-mails to various state officials cannot sue those officials for his termination, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said yesterday in ruling on the director’s civil rights suit.
Public relations director L. Meriwether German worked for the Shenandoah Valley Travel Association, a private non-profit [...]

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Any “grace period” litigators have had since the new e-discovery rules went into effect in December 2006 may be coming to a close.
“Courts are becoming increasingly intolerant of e-discovery errors and omissions,” says Jeane Thomas, a Washington D.C. lawyer and expert on e-discovery. Thomas was on a panel program June 15 at Virginia Beach presented [...]

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Any “grace period” litigators have had since the new e-discovery rules went into effect in December 2006 may be coming to a close.
“Courts are becoming increasingly intolerant of e-discovery errors and omissions,” says Jeane Thomas, a Washington D.C. lawyer and expert on e-discovery. Thomas was on a panel program June 15 at Virginia Beach presented [...]

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Is using your office e-mail with its signature stamp the same as using office letterhead?
Should anyone down a chain of distribution that you can’t control assume that your e-mail speaks for your employer?
Office e-mail comes pretty close to company letterhead, according to one federal judge who considered the question in an unpublished opinion in Bowers [...]

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