Apple’s corporate e-mail policy looking shaky
Judging by the company’s corporate image, you might imagine working for Apple is a pretty laid-back experience, free from the stifling rulebooks of most major organizations. That may not be the case, but it’s emerged that the company’s policy on storing e-mails is a little too relaxed for some lawyers.
The issue is in the spotlight in the wake of the ongoing Apple lawsuit against Mac-clone manufacturer Psystar. The Industry Standard website has picked up on a note in the legal filing where the two sides outline their cases and agree the terms of how the case will proceed now they’ve abandoned attempts at out-of-court agreement.
In the section of the filing dealing with the availability of evidence, Apple reveals that:
At Apple, individual employees are tasked with maintenance of their own files including hard copy documents, emails, voicemails and other electronically recorded materials.
The firm points out that it doesn’t automatically delete e-mails itself. However, the big issue here is that there’s no consistent policy about how employees deal with e-mails – and nothing to stop them deleting e-mails which might later prove legally important.
There’s no law that says a company has to have an e-mail management policy or to keep e-mails for a certain amount of time. However, whenever a firm even becomes aware of a possibility of a lawsuit, it must preserve all relevant e-mails in case the other side requires them as evidence. That’s naturally impossible if they’ve already been deleted.
How firms should deal with this issue depends on their size and set-up. For a small business, the costs of keeping all e-mails may outweigh the risk that they’ll ever be needed. For a firm the size of Apple, it’s pretty much guaranteed they’ll face regular lawsuits (whether or not they prove legally justified). And if Apple can’t figure out a way to archive e-mails efficiently, who can?
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