Reading and responding to work-related emails is "time worked," for which non-exempt employees usually must be paid. Hanson, but if I don't send an email while I'm thinking about it, I'll forget and it will never get done.īut he has a valid point about outside-working-hours emails if we're talking about employees who are non-exempt under the Fair Labor Standards Act. (Pardon me while I finish laughing.) Sorry, Mr. Hanson says you shouldn't send a business-related email before 10 a.m. Unfortunately, everybody stopped reading your 16-paragraph email after Paragraph 9, so the fully satisfactory performer in 57 protected categories is fired, and your company gets sued. Long story short, I do not recommend terminating this employee who is a member of 57 protected categories and whose job performance is, at worst, fully satisfactory." From a litigation defense standpoint, overly lengthy emails can be bad in at least two ways: (1) They're frequently too long because they contain too much information (including information that could hurt you in a lawsuit), and (2) if you have an important point to make, it may be lost because your recipients either stopped reading before they got all the way through or didn't bother to slog through it at all.ĮXAMPLE: "I apologize for the length of this email. Hanson's point is that emails should be concise: "Long, Pulitzer-worthy missives are never viewed with much favour." Of course, Mr. But here are his general tips, plus my commentary from a legal perspective. Hanson is British, and not all of his email advice would carry over well into U.S. Last week, he had a column on email etiquette, which got me thinking about the ways that handling email correctly can help employers prevent lawsuits and successfully defend them.
#Idem redacted email lawsuit how to#
William Hanson, the etiquette columnist for the Daily Mail, provides fun and snarky advice on how to be polite. The litigator's secret weapon: good manners.
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