How does email put a company at risk? In many ways, says Missouri-based IT lawyer Dennis Kennedy. Writing in the Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Journal, Kennedy argues that personal emails at work (and that includes jokes, inappropriate yarns, etc) can put the company at risk of a security breach or lawsuits. Another problem is the way storage limitations at work force some people to save emails on systems outside the corporate network. That creates the risk of confidential information falling into the wrong hands.

The other risk comes with the growth of e-discovery. David Thompson, the head of AXS-One in Australia and the Asia-Pacific cites figures showing that:
* There are approximately 125 ongoing legal matters in a typical Fortune 500 company, with at least 75 per cent of them requiring e-discovery.
* US firms are expected to spend $US1.2 billion on outside e-discovery services in 2005, projected at $1.9 billion in 2006.
* 10 per cent of corporate lawyers reported their businesses settled a case rather than incur the cost of e-discovery.

Miriam Schulman, communications director of the Markkula Centre for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University says email overload changes how we treat each other and how we treat common resources. She suggests some ethical approaches to the problem.

And just as a reminder, there's always the story of attorney Scott Pratt who has been charged with contempt of court and accused of giving certain advice, via email, that's now landed him in trouble