A former Twitter employee, Gary Rooney, won about $600,000 for unfair dismissal after Twitter assumed he resigned by not responding to Elon Musk’s “hardcore” work email.
The case highlighted the importance of clear communication between employers and employees, especially regarding significant changes in employment terms.
Rooney’s private Slack messages, where he discussed leaving, were used as evidence by Twitter, underscoring that internal communication on platforms like Slack is not always private and can be used in legal disputes.
No he’s actually right, it’s a SOX thing. Not all companies do it but big ones with good legal departments generally do. Especially if they’re into shady s***.
The concept rules like this: we delete all emails over 90 days old. If someone subpoena’s emails over 90 days old we simply say they don’t exist we delete emails over 90 days old and show them the policy. From there it gets a little more dicey if people cram stuff into local stores.
From a corporate standpoint there’s a strong advantage to deleting all of your old emails and not keeping backups over 90 days especially for anything that might be legally questionable.
That said with the advent of SAAS, there’s a hell of a lot of data out there that doesn’t ever go away even if you do your best to make it happen.