Five Employer Takeaways From The Hillary Clinton Email Scandal

Thank Hillary Clinton for putting best email practices in the spotlight - or should we say her worst practices. The former secretary of state said she used one email address for convenience during her tenure from 2009 to 2013 as United States Secretary of State. Unfortunately, the email account was tied to an unsecured email server registered to her home instead of a Department of State email account. The rest is history.

The takeaway for anyone running a business has less to do with politics, and more to do with keeping emails secure and making sure your company is following the rules when it comes to compliance requests and eDiscovery laws.

The reality is in this BYOD era it’s easy for employees to blur the line between work and personal email. But let Clinton’s email scandal serve as a wakeup call for any business that wants to avoid finding themselves in a Clintonesque email debacle.

Here are five takeaways from the Hillary Clinton’s email worst practices.

One: As an employer you have the right to pretty much monitor any email, instant message or any other electronic communication that takes place on your computer system. But still, personal email accounts exist outside of IT’s control. There is no backup, security is an unknown and you can forget about digital paper trails, syncing and eDiscovery.

Once the damage has been done you may be out of luck. That’s because personal missives sent via a personal email account by an employee are not discoverable in standard legal discovery procedures. Good luck with that audit, lawsuit or government compliance request.