Re: Confidentiality notices on email messages

[Martin Rex <[e-mail]>]

Randall Gellens wrote:
> 
> I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on TV or the net, so I likely 
> don't understand the situation.  As a point of possibly interesting 
> information, once upon a time, at a training session held by a lawyer 
> regarding how to protect confidential information, we were admonished 
> not to slap a "confidential" label on anything automatically or 
> without consideration, because, we were warned, doing so can cause 
> the label to lose meaning for everything.  In other words, if we 
> labelled everything "confidential," then we were really saying 
> nothing was confidential.

Congratulation for having met a lawyer with a clue in law.
This assessment is definitely valid for Germany.


> 
> Ever since, I've wondered if these notices were set up by someone who 
> is a lawyer and does understand the situation, or if they were set up 
> by someone who saw others do it, or heard that this sort of thing was 
> needed.

These notices are often suggested by real lawyers.

But it is hard to determine whether they are from the simple
clueless type, or whether they know that this notice is bogus, but
also know that there are many clueless folks, clueless other lawyers
and clueless judges out there that will fall for it, therefore
providing some small value in probabilistic terms. 


-Martin