InsideCounsel » November 2007
Certifiable Evidence
Registered e-mail authenticates messages produced during discovery.
Peter Prinsen, general counsel of The Graham Co., an insurance brokerage firm, recently learned that knowing whether a recipient received an e-mail can be more important than the content of the e-mail itself.
The brokerage routinely receives information about a claim from the client and then reports that claim to the insurance carrier via e-mail. Normally this is a smooth process. But the company hit a snag several months ago when one of the carriers said it hadn’t received a $60,000 claim.
“The carrier was claiming the insured did not provide notice in time and thus was going to deny coverage,” Prinsen says. “Our client, in turn, would have turned around and filed suit against us if this was the case.”
But The Graham Co. had planned ahead by implementing registered e-mail last year. Like its non-digital counterpart certified mail, registered e-mail provides a quick and affordable method to verify the sending and receiving of electronic messages.
Because Prinsen had sent the claim using registered e-mail, he was able to verify that the message had reached the carrier’s system and stave off a lawsuit.
Prinsen’s averted e-mail debacle exemplifies one of registered e-mail’s key uses—mitigating risks associated with sensitive communications. But thanks to a recent court case that highlights the need for a method to authenticate e-mails when submitting them as evidence, registered e-mail might be finding a new use.
“Registered e-mail really creates a way to track a lot of stuff,” says Dennis Kennedy, a St. Louis-based legal technology consultant. “At trial I believe it will meet a court’s standards, in most cases, for parties to rely on it to prove authenticity rather than having to foot the cost of a computer forensics expert.”
Message Mechanics
Registered e-mail comes in different flavors, each employing a unique method to capture information about the e-mail’s transmission and authenticate its contents.
One leader in the market is California-based RPost. The company has just started to target in-house legal teams, although it’s been providing its services to government, associations and law firms since 2003.
RPost users have a special “Registered E-mail” button on their e-mail application that they can click to send registered messages. When a message is sent, RPost’s system tracks the message to the recipient’s server. As the message hits the server and the recipient views the message, RPost packages this information in the form of an e-mail receipt and sends it to the sender.
