Attorney/Client Privilege Trumps Company E-Mail Surveillance
The New Jersey Supreme Court on Tuesday gave workers in New Jersey an assurance of privacy in using workplace computers to talk with their lawyers, ruling a company’s e-mail-monitoring policy yields to the attorney-client privilege.
Chief Justice Stuart Rabner, writing for the unanimous court in Stengart v. Loving Care Agency Inc., A-16-09, said a plaintiff in an employment discrimination suit against her employer had a reasonable expectation that e-mails to and from her attorney on her personal Yahoo account would be private, although transmitted via a company-owned laptop.
While finding the employer’s policy ambiguous in its reach, Rabner said that “even a more clearly written company manual — that is, a policy that banned all personal computer use and provided unambiguous notice that an employer could retrieve and read an employee’s attorney-client communications, if accessed on a personal, password-protected e-mail account using the company’s computer system — would not be enforceable.”
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