2002 was the Year of Corporate Scandal. But really it wouldn't be fair to give all the credit to
grasping, conniving executives and malevolent, sneaky bookkeepers. No, as those corporate
honchos offer their plea bargains, they'll all be able to name an accomplice: e-mail. For
prosecutors, it has become the star witness or perhaps an even better weapon than that.
Think of e-mail as the corporate equivalent of DNA evidence, that single hair left at the crime
scene that turns the entire case. In theory you can explain it away, but good luck trying. So
ubiquitous has the smoking e-mail become that some lawyers have taken to calling it 'evidence
mail'. Who knew that a nation could become so transfixed by writing? There was the Stephen
King of e-mail prose whose output was as prolific as it was haunting. Former Salomon Smith
Barney analyst Jack Grubman favored a terser style-he's reportedly a BlackBerry man-for what
he would later claim were his fictional musings. But literary style notwithstanding, their e-mails
shared a common plot: jacking up stock ratings to please investment-bank clients. Does anybody
think the nation's biggest brokerages would have agreed to hand over $1.5 billion in settlements
if not for this electronic paper trail? Nor was the pox limited to the Wall Street houses. Like
forgotten land mines, unfortunate e-mails involving Enron, WorldCom, Qwest, Global Crossing,
and Tyco exploded sporadically throughout the year. There was even damaging e-mail about
e-mail, as happened with the J.P. Morgan Chase banker who warned a colleague to "shut up
and delete this e-mail." But even that seemingly obvious fix can bring its own perils. Five big
Wall Street brokerages coughed up $8.25 million in fines in December for failing to preserve
electronic messages, as securities rules require. And one cannot forget Arthur Andersen, whose
destruction of Enron-related transmissions led to a criminal conviction and eventually to the
accounting firm's implosion. While the degree of punishment was exceptional, the fact of it
wasn't: Judges are increasingly imposing penalties on companies that can't turn over old
e-mails when the court demands them. And so it boils down to this, to borrow an old phrase:
Companies can't live with e-mail, and they definitely can't live without it. As we've seen it's
increasingly a legal albatross--and, at the very least, a fast track to public humiliation. But
then it's also the most important business technology since the advent of the telephone.
It's invaluable in allowing far-flung offices to communicate and it lets employees work from
anywhere. It has freed us from the tyranny of phone tag and given us an effortless way to
transmit lengthy documents without so much as a busy fax signal. If you have any doubt how
much the technology has worked its way into your daily life, just ask yourself this: How many
times a day do you check your e-mail?