Some of our VIPs this month are:

Irma Herrera and the ER Team - many, many thanks to the ER team for their help in contacting the faculty who had not submitted their Mid-term grades.  The ER team is an incredible resource to have available.  E-mails are fine.  E-Blasts are good.  Post cards work okay.  But there is nothing as effective as a phone call from a real person.  Please tell the team THANKS.  John Hall

Laura Del Rio - Thanks Laura that will really help [to enable us to go on retreat].  Looking at the call reports over the last several months, Thursday seems to be our slowest day so we are hoping this will hold true.  Thanks again for your support of ER.  Irma Herrera

E-mail disclaimer
doesn't do the job

Do you protect your e-mails with a disclaimer at the bottom stating that your messages contain confidential information meant only for the intended recipient?  Those disclaimers usually threaten - nicely, of course - that to spread any of the information is "prohibited" and "may be unlawful."  Well, think again, warns Peter Vogel, a partner with Gardere Wynne Sewell LLP who teaches Internet law. Slapping disclaimers on every e-mail may dilute their legal effectiveness."  The prophylactic view of the world is that if you put a disclaimer on everything, then when you actually need it, it's there," says Mr. Vogel, who teaches law of electronic commerce at Southern Methodist University's Dedman School of Law. "Actually, the opposite is true. If you put it on everything, what you're really saying is nothing is important or protected."

I get e-mails all the time warning me that if I was supposed to get the message, I shouldn't share the information. And if I got it by accident, I should forget I ever saw it.  That's quite an assumption, given that I'm a newspaper columnist.  My most ludicrous experience was when one of the world's largest corporations attached a for-your-eyes-only warning to an official statement that it knew I was going to publish.  That got me to thinking about what legal ramifications these disclaimers actually have.

Darn few, says Mr. Vogel. Most of the time, you can dismiss them as meaningless. "You can only be 'prohibited' by contractual agreement, if one exists, or some statute, but you have to be told which statute applies.  Otherwise there is no means to enforce."

So how did these things become so prevalent?  Mr. Vogel asks me to remember the dawn of the Fax Machine Age - knowing I was around back in the '70s.  When lawyers started faxing documents used as courtroom evidence, they added a generic disclaimer to protect attorney-client privilege.  E-mail started showing up as trial evidence in the 1980s but became the way of the world in the mid-1990s. The problem of protecting attorney-client privilege resurfaced.

'Magic words' 
"So the American Bar Association came up with recommendations for lawyers' use to protect privilege and confidentiality," he says. The judge would say the privilege was intact if you had used the magic words.  Many lawyers - if not most - add disclaimers at the bottom of every e-mail, he says.  But not Mr. Vogel: "I selectively add them only to things that truly have attorney-client privilege."

Why?  "If I send an e-mail with a disclaimer to an opponent in a lawsuit, there's obviously no privilege or confidentiality associated with the correspondence," he says. "Doing this pulls into question the privilege protection of every related communication.  "If I were representing you and trying to get privileged denied, I'd say, 'This has no meaning because they attach it to everything.'"  Then it becomes a judge's call.

"Judges are not trained in this stuff. So they use their best judgment to decide whether someone intended to protect a trade secret or attorney-client privilege - or whether it's public information that might just as well be on the front page of The Dallas Morning News as anywhere else." 

One sound use of disclaimers is to protect trade secrets, Mr. Vogel says.  But make sure that you spell out the statutes you intend to enforce and that you really are protecting intellectual property.

But there's an even more critical point about e-mails that attorneys and businesspeople should consider, he says. Often the wisest protection is not to send your message as an e-mail in the first place.  "You have to assume that every e-mail that you send might wind up in litigation,"

Pick up the phone.  Mr. Vogel says, using Bill Gates as a classic example.  "In the U.S. antitrust case against Microsoft, David Boies took Gates apart because of his e-mail that said the competition needed to be destroyed," Mr. Vogel says. "Gates didn't need to say that in an e-mail. He could have picked up the phone and told that to whomever he wanted."  You should assume that anything you put in an e-mail is going to be seen by a jury, Mr. Vogel says. "If a jury hears something once, they may or may not believe it. If they hear it a second time, they start believing it's possible.  "But if they see an e-mail that's the size of a wall in a courtroom, they absolutely believe it's true."

PubDate:  10/10/2007
Day:  Wednesday
Publication:  THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Head:  E-mail disclaimer doesn't do the job
Byline:  CHERYL HALL

 DON'T FORGET
Division Meeting
November 7

Important Dates
Oct. 29 - Enrollment begins Spring 2008
Nov. 5 - Last day to drop a class
Nov. 9-10 - Homecoming
Nov. 19-20 - Fall Break
Nov. 21 - No classes
Nov. 22-23 - Thanksgiving Holiday
Nov. 28 - Last day to withdraw
Dec. 6 - Last day of instruction
Dec. 7-8 - Reading Days
Dec. 10-15 - Examinations
Dec. 15 - Graduation
Dec. 24-28 - Winter Break

Answer
The Seventh Annual Staff Recognition Ceremony is being held in the Hughes-Trigg Theatre on October 23rd.  A reception will be at 10am and the ceremony will begin promptly at 10:30am.  Staff who have served SMU for 25 years will be inducted into the 25+ Club.  In addition recipients of the Loretta Hawkins and Presidential Awards will be announced.

President Gerald Turner will recognize the inductees and award recipients.  Provost Paul Ludden will be the featured speaker.