E-Policies
- dusted-off your employee email/Internet-usage policies? Are your employees using Instant Messaging to communicate with customers, posting blogs, updating Facebook pages, using WiFi connections at Starbucks, or using Skype for phone calls? Do employees receive company-related email on their cellphones?
- ever had a computer security problem? Is the financial information in your servers secure? Do you maintain credit card information from consumers? Do you hold proprietary information of your customers?
- written your website “privacy policy”? Does it cover offline, hardcopy records? Are your servers collecting IP addresses (and more) from visitors to your website?
- ever been involved in a lawsuit where email records are important? Would a broad e-discovery demand affect your ongoing business operations?
These are some areas of e-policy planning that your peers have encountered—you have your own list of risks and priorities. Your company’s competitive advantage depends on your employees’ ability to make the most of available communication technologies, but each new tool brings with it new risks.
- fit your operations—where your employees work, what kind of information they handle, and how flexible (or buttoned-down) is the company culture
- create legal protection for the company, by specifically prohibiting certain conduct
- create legal rights for the company (e.g., by defeating unreasonable employee privacy expectations)
- reduce the number and severity of security problems, by raising awareness
Unaddressed, these areas can cause big headaches. Naively addressed, these areas can involve huge expense. We understand the terminology and “language” used by your lawyers, your IT personnel, and your managers. We also understand the benefit from realistic, pragmatic solutions (rather than the fruitless pursuit of perfection), and can help you strike a reasoned, informed balance among competing “requirements”. And, where the law seems to set absolute requirements that are impossible to achieve, we’ve helped create industry “best-practices” that mirror our clients’ operations while providing an umbrella defense.