Kevin Schlosser Authors, "E-Mail E-Merging E-Normously in Litigation" for Nassau Lawyer

Publication Source: The Nassau Lawyer

We read the headlines time and again about devastating, “smoking-gun” e-mail uncovered in legal actions. After facing days of grueling depositions at the hands of David Boies, Microsoft’s Bill Gates lamented at a news conference: “I had expected Mr. Boies to ask me about competition in the software industry, but he didn’t do that.” Instead, “he put pieces of paper in front of me and asked about words from e-mails that were three years old.”¹ As we now know, those “e-mails from three years ago” had a dramatic impact upon the Government’s antitrust case against Microsoft, leading a reporter to comment on the front page of The New York Times: “Never mind monopoly power in the marketplace; the real lesson corporate America is taking away from the Microsoft antitrust trial is that old e-mail can be a minefield of legal liability, not to mention a source of public embarrassment.”²

Notwithstanding Microsoft’s own blunders, it too has taken advantage of an adversary’s ill-advised e-mail. Bristol Technology, a small company attempting to survive against Microsoft’s dominance, found out the hard way that e-mail can derail a case with so much as one sentence. Even though Bristol reportedly presented overwhelming evidence of Microsoft’s monopolization of the market, a jury rejected its case because of a critical e-mail sent by one of Bristol’s directors coining the company’s litigation strategy as the “We sue Microsoft for money business plan.”³

Indeed, e-mail has haunted even the top chief executive in the nation, who had to endure massive publicity about notorious e-mails from Monica Lewinsky to Linda Tripp detailing her affair with the President; in one such e-mail Lewinsky complains that the “Big Creep didn’t even try to call me on [Valentine’s]-Day.”

Read the full article in the attached PDF.

-----

Kevin Schlosser is a Shareholder at Meyer, Suozzi, English & Klein, P.C., where he is Chair of the Litigation and Alternative Dispute Resolution Department which has a full roster of available private judges from virtually all disciplines of law. Mr. Schlosser also authors the popular blog, “New York Fraud Claims,” which analyzes the latest developments concerning civil fraud claims under New York law.

Reprinted with permission by The Nassau Lawyer.