Common Reasons Why Companies Use Email Disclaimers But, I’m jumping ahead by addressing one of the primary reasons not to use certain standard email footers. As the Vice President of the Association of Corporate Counsel put it, so long as “you have your order from Chipotle marked as privileged… no one will take you seriously.” Additionally, because disclaimers are placed at the end of the message, recipients will probably gloss over them after having read the main message further up the page. Sinclair’s article underscores the reality that automatically including disclaimers in every email decreases any given email footer’s overall effectiveness. The sender also concedes that he is very, very stupid, and obviously should not be operating an electronic-mail machine without supervision. If it does, it will have said it does … because the law is tricky like that…. IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: This email does not create an attorney-client relationship. Reporting that no one noticed, Sinclair, a litigator, eventually published his satirical masterpiece in the humor website McSweeney’s. Reporting on a recent finding that less than 10% of email recipients read the attached disclaimers on messages (10%? can it really be THAT high!?!), attorney James Sinclair started ending all his email messages with a humorous disclaimer. One New York attorney (kudos to a fellow attorney for delivering such practical advice!) referred to email disclaimers as the modern equivalent of mattress tags: “And has anyone ever been arrested for tearing them off?” he asked the Wall Street Journal.Īn important criticism of email disclaimers points to studies that most recipients ignore them. Many people, including the folks at The Economist, question the effectiveness of email disclaimers. Questioning the Value of Standard Email Footers Keep reading (hint: the answer has to do with our collective mistake letting the lawyers (full disclosure – I am one of them) run our country!!). If so many companies use email disclaimers, they must have value, legally or otherwise, right? Why else would so many companies use them? Good question. It’s rare I receive an email from a company of any size that doesn’t include an auto-placed standard email disclaimer at the bottom of the email. ![]() I recently received an email and the email disclaimer (in the footer of the email) at the bottom was over 1,000 words long.
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