I am having correspondence with my employers whilst I am off sick.
Hopefully not but could end up at an employment tribunal.

I tend to use email but they tend to send the main stuff on paper.

Is email accepted as readily as paper by courts and tribunals?

On 24 Jul, 16:10, Invisible Man wrote:
I am having correspondence with my employers whilst I am off sick.
Hopefully not but could end up at an employment tribunal.

I tend to use email but they tend to send the main stuff on paper.

Is email accepted as readily as paper by courts and tribunals?

A spoken word can be evidence. However people's memories are not that
good so it is generally better to write things down.

A email can easily be tampered with. So can a printed letter.

Letters will arguably look better than emails as they are being
presented to a tribunal. If I were you I would write letters but that
is not to say that emails won't suffice.

wrote in message
...
On 24 Jul, 16:10, Invisible Man wrote:
I am having correspondence with my employers whilst I am off sick.
Hopefully not but could end up at an employment tribunal.

I tend to use email but they tend to send the main stuff on paper.

Is email accepted as readily as paper by courts and tribunals?

A spoken word can be evidence. However people's memories are not that
good so it is generally better to write things down.

A email can easily be tampered with. So can a printed letter.

Letters will arguably look better than emails as they are being
presented to a tribunal. If I were you I would write letters but that
is not to say that emails won't suffice.


AFAIK emails have the same legal status as a letter. It's arguably more
difficult to tamper with an email.

I would say that the OP should BCC a 3rd party in every email - extra proof
if needed. Note - this is not an option available to the company (sending
letters). It is unlikely they have proff of postage or traceability in
transit - things that are available via email.

Anthony R. Gold wrote:
On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:10:04 +0100, Invisible Man
wrote:

I am having correspondence with my employers whilst I am off sick.
Hopefully not but could end up at an employment tribunal.

I tend to use email but they tend to send the main stuff on paper.

Is email accepted as readily as paper by courts and tribunals?

Why would that be important? If you end up before an employment tribunal
then the material issues will be what was done (or not done) and what both
your contract and the law says about them. What you wrote in your emails
may have been correct or incorrect but it will usually be irrelevant unless
someone is claiming either that the email was itself offensive or else that
the email correspondence brought about some change in the contract. It is
unlikely that your own messages, which in general may be self-serving, will
be helpful to your own case in any contractual dispute.

Tony

I am a DDA case. Various re adjustments, how things were handled,
pressures applied, reasonable/unreasonable requests. Don't want to go
into all the detail here in case someone involved picks up on it.

your contract and the law says about them. What you wrote in your emails
may have been correct or incorrect but it will usually be irrelevant unless
someone is claiming either that the email was itself offensive or else that
the email correspondence brought about some change in the contract. It is
unlikely that your own messages, which in general may be self-serving, will
be helpful to your own case in any contractual dispute.

If, for example, your employer is asserting that you accepted
contractual changes by default then it is extremely important that you
have a record of your correspondence rejecting those changes.

At least that's what my solicitor told me a couple of weeks ago.

On the subject of emails, make sure you keep a paper copy. It is fairly
common for employers to have a "document retention policy" that deletes
important emails before the case comes to court.

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:35:06 +0100, "CJM"
wrote:

AFAIK emails have the same legal status as a letter. It's arguably more
difficult to tamper with an email.

From a technical POV, it's very easy indeed to tamper with the content
of an email message unless it's been signed by a cryptographically
secure method.

Mike.

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:10:04 +0100, Invisible Man
wrote:

Is email accepted as readily as paper by courts and tribunals?

Possibly, however it is trivially easy for either you or the company
to alter a local e-mail records which leaves them open to challenge.
If you feel there is a possibility that documents may be tampered with
or that the company may suggest you are altering them yourself it may
be in your interest to use only paper mail as the company are.
--
Peter Parry
Hemel Hempstead

On 24 Jul, 23:10, Peter Parry wrote:
On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:10:04 +0100, Invisible Man

wrote:
Is email accepted as readily as paper by courts and tribunals?

Possibly, however it is trivially easy for either you or the company
to alter a local *e-mail records which leaves them open to challenge.
If you feel there is a possibility that documents may be tampered with
or that the company may suggest you are altering them yourself it may
be in your interest to use only paper mail as the company are.

However, the beauty of email is that there are two seperate copies -
the one you sent, and the one the recipient received. If one is
altered, it is trivial for the opposing party to produce their copy,
which cannot have been altered, at least not by the same person.

TimB wrote:
On 24 Jul, 23:10, Peter Parry wrote:
On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:10:04 +0100, Invisible Man

wrote:
Is email accepted as readily as paper by courts and tribunals?
Possibly, however it is trivially easy for either you or the company
to alter a local e-mail records which leaves them open to challenge.
If you feel there is a possibility that documents may be tampered with
or that the company may suggest you are altering them yourself it may
be in your interest to use only paper mail as the company are.

However, the beauty of email is that there are two seperate copies -
the one you sent, and the one the recipient received. If one is
altered, it is trivial for the opposing party to produce their copy,
which cannot have been altered, at least not by the same person.

In which case you still couldn't tell which one had been altered, just
that one of them had been.

You can however digitally sign the email, then you'd know which one was
amended.

TimB writes:

However, the beauty of email is that there are two seperate copies -
the one you sent, and the one the recipient received. If one is
altered, it is trivial for the opposing party to produce their copy,
which cannot have been altered, at least not by the same person.

But how do you show which copy has been altered? Unless it is
cryptographically signed (in which case the recipient cannot alter it
without 'breaking' the signature), there is no way to tell whether it
was the sender or recipient (or even both) who altered their copy.