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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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e-mail comes pretty close to company letterhead, according to one federal judge who considered the question in an unpublished opinion [...]

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