A former Twitter employee, Gary Rooney, won about $600,000 for unfair dismissal after Twitter assumed he resigned by not responding to Elon Musk’s “hardcore” work email.
The case highlighted the importance of clear communication between employers and employees, especially regarding significant changes in employment terms.
Rooney’s private Slack messages, where he discussed leaving, were used as evidence by Twitter, underscoring that internal communication on platforms like Slack is not always private and can be used in legal disputes.
Most companies have a strict policy to delete everything off of exchange after a few months unless there is a reason to keep it longer. You can’t bring up in court anything that wan daleted before you looked.
I don’t think that’s true. We archive all email within the company as soon as it arrives. This is done to prevent an employee from deleting any evidence for many reasons that they may have. We are also on litigation hold which requires all data to be saved and since we can’t trust everyone to do this we are required to back up everything until we are told not to. We have used restored data many times for legal cases in the past.
Where I work there is a data retention policy, and emails and other forms of communication (internal emails and slack, but even customer calls, etc) are deleted after a set amount of time, which varies depending on the rationale for storing that data.
There’s many reasons to do this - limit disclosure issues in case of litigation, reduce storage costs, comply with PII rules around the world, etc. The guys in Legal have us file these loong ass forms about all this, including where the data is kept, security measures, etc etc etc.
I’m shocked this isn’t common practice everywhere.
There are two main types of data retention policy:
It’s a little more nuanced than that, of course, but in broad strokes that’s how I’ve seen it play out. Does the company want to pin the blame on somebody or shrug and say “we have no idea how that can have happened, guess we need to forget about it.”
I think that’s an understandable position but IT is ruled in a cost benefit analysis for many small to medium sized businesses, so I am sure if it’s as common practice there
No he’s actually right, it’s a SOX thing. Not all companies do it but big ones with good legal departments generally do. Especially if they’re into shady s***.
The concept rules like this: we delete all emails over 90 days old. If someone subpoena’s emails over 90 days old we simply say they don’t exist we delete emails over 90 days old and show them the policy. From there it gets a little more dicey if people cram stuff into local stores.
From a corporate standpoint there’s a strong advantage to deleting all of your old emails and not keeping backups over 90 days especially for anything that might be legally questionable.
That said with the advent of SAAS, there’s a hell of a lot of data out there that doesn’t ever go away even if you do your best to make it happen.
I’ve contracted for companies with email policies that nuke anything older than 30 days.
I typically learn it the hard way when I go back to look for an email I need and…it has been deleted.