E-mail as legal documents

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Peter

I am currently being sued by a man who claims that e-mails
I sent him constitute a legally binding contract (this is
under UK law).

The e-mails that the claimant is presenting have, I
believe been edited after the event and/or been created
totally ficticiously.

Unfortunately I no longer have the laptop on which the e-
mail communication between us was stored so I do not have
records and am having to rely on the rules of disclosure
of evidence.

To date all the solicitors involved seem quite happy to
accept that because the claimant has e-mails on his PC and
print them out then these e-mails are genuine.

I believe though that Outlook includes security features
that would enable me to demonstrate that the e-mails the
claimant presents have been edited after he received them
and - in the case of the created e-mails - the date that
they were created and that they were not really sent to me
at all.

Questions:

1) Is my understanding outlined in the paragraph above
fundamentally correct?
2) How do I demonstrate this (in particular I need to know
what files I need from the claimant to demonstrate the
validity or otherwise of the e-mails)
3) Is there any UK case law that touches on this subject?

Many thanks for your help!

Peter
 
To date all the solicitors involved seem quite happy to
accept that because the claimant has e-mails on his PC and
print them out then these e-mails are genuine.
Click to expand...

Then they aren't very bright. It really does sounds like you need an
expert, which I am not. However you could refer your solicitor to these
papers...

http://www.datasec.co.uk/whitepapers/Non_Technical_Overview.pdf

Quote:

Paper is not electronic
A common misconception is that a printed .physical. copy of an email is
always a true representation of the
electronic communication between one person and another. This is not always
the case. A printed copy of
a genuine email is merely a .visible representation. of the final part of
the communication process.

<snip>

Case Study
At Canterbury Crown Court, February 2003 DataSec.s defence expert witness
showed a .live.
demonstration to the court (the first ever in the UK) on how electronic mail
can be manipulated in real time.
It showed how easy it was to make an email .appear. to have been sent to
someone when in fact it had
been forged. When the email was opened in Microsoft Outlook it appeared no
different to the paper emails
that had been offered by the prosecution, without audit trail information,
as evidence. Only a ful technical
examination of the complete audit trail would have shown that the email had
been intercepted and changed.

End Quote:

http://www.internetworld.co.uk/london/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&ArticleID=368

Quote:

Under the Civil Evidence Act 1995, any email used as evidence in court is
subject to something called evidential weight. Electronic documents can be
lost, copied or altered pretty easily without anyone noticing. Or, as
technology advances, emails might be moved from one archive to another, and
corrupted along the way. 'In other words, just because you've got the email
doesn't mean we believe you,' says Davies. In the case of a contract
dispute, you might have an email including an offer of a discount. The suppl
ier has another email suggesting a different version of events. Who is the
court to believe? If your email archive is stored on a standard SMTP server
where it's accessible by the entire IT staff, and it's been migrated twice
by your outsourcing company, you can bet it won't be you.

End quote.

and thinking aloud.....

If this person backed up his computer regularly you could demand access to
backups made around the time the email would have been recieved. If he can't
produce these why not?

If he is still using that computer without having sealed a full backup
somewhere then you could argue that he is inadvertantly or otherwise
tampering with the evidence? As soon as he realised that the email was
evidence he should have switched off his system and deposited it somewhere
secure - like his laywers office or a bank safe deposit box?

Get yourself an expert.

Colin
 
Eventually I think I will, though I want to understand
more about the issue before I call in an (expensive)
witness.

Rgds

Peter
 
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