This part of the book provides a brief overview of:
- key legislation governing email, ways to limit your personal liability and avoid starring in an email-generated media scandal and tribunal
- top tips to protect yourself from cyber-crime and the costs relating to disinfecting your computer and network.
Five steps to improving my productivity – staying within the law
E-disclosure is the term applied to the use of digital documents (including emails) as evidence in a trial. The laws relating to email are many and complex. Some have been touched upon in Chapter 14 (for example, the Companies Act).
It is easy to leak company confidential data. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) ‘Information Security Breaches Survey’ in 2010 found that 83 to 92 per cent of business had suffered some form of security breach. The cost of a breach of compliance and security can be expensive. PwC estimated it ranged from £28,000 for a small company (less than 50 staff) to half a million for a large business (more than 500 staff). Not all incidents were email-induced, but email is nonetheless a major source of cyber-crime in terms of spreading viruses, malware (software which harms your PC) and phishing attacks (luring you to bogus websites to disclose details of a web account, generally financial). The PwC survey revealed that security breaches had trebled in the last two years and are rising.
The 2007 KPMG Forensic survey, ‘e-Disclosure: The 21st Century Legal Challenge’ alarmingly found that many high court judges and senior court officials are ill equipped to deal with e-evidence.
There is therefore scope to be even more productive both as an individual and a business, if you take measures to stay on the right side of the law and protect yourself (and your business) from cyber-crime. This is the last step in the personal journey to squeeze those extra few efficiency gains from using email effectively.