Lawyers Chime in on Outbound Email Monitoring

There's an interesting new article over at Law.com today that reports on findings from our Outbound Email and Data Loss Prevention in Today's Enterprise, 2009 report. In addition to some of the key findings (for example, that 38% of large US employers use staff to monitor outbound email to prevent data leaks) there's some good commentary from legal professionals.

In the article, New Hires to Monitor Outbound E-mail, employment attorney Anthony Oncidi of Proskauer Rose says, "It's almost impossible to keep up with what might be walking out of the door." He goes on to say that employers are smart to have an ongoing monitoring program that might include reading or analyzing the contents of outbound email.

Other employment attorneys gave a different opinion. Christopher Mills, partner at Fisher & Phillips notes that monitoring employee email can hurt morale and could give employers a bad public image, should an employee sue for invasion of privacy.

Of course, all of these issues are why Proofpoint advocates that organizations use technology to monitor outbound email and automatically block, encrypt or otherwise properly dispose of email that contains sensitive content (such as private financial, healthcare and identity information, trade secrets or other confidential info)... without having to resort to having employees read through other employees' outbound email!

For more recent discussion of email security and compliance issues related to the legal profession, see my post, Email Archiving Saves Law Firm Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars per Discovery Event.

Comments

[Douglas Brush]

Great report. Always better to take proactive approaches than trying to close the bard door after the horse (or employee) leaves.

[Keith R. Crosley]

Glad you enjoyed our report! Thanks for the comment -- love the metaphor.