Posted by
FunnyMae
14 yrs ago
I have resigned from my company and accepted an offer from a comptetitor. The offer of the new company had been as per the introduction of a colleague, who for many months, had been unhappy with his employment in our present firm.
When I left, for security reasons, the management have searched all my emails, both work related and personal. Some of the latter had been deleted but I suppose I have not deleted all, and this included my correspondence with the colleague who referred me to my new job.
When the company saw this, they fired my colleague. I was shcoked and devastated as I know this is due to our carelessness, using company resource for personal matters.
The most depressing to me now is that my colleague, in his anger at this stage, is threatening to sue me. For what cause, I do not know. What should I do.
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Cannot see any cause. Your colleague, I assume, sent/replied to an email address that they knew was a work email address. The colleague should have been aware that replying/sending to a work email address has inherent risk and that it could have been intercepted and read.
Again, I assume, there was no request from your colleague to delete the emails. Even if you did delete as far as I understand most emails can still be recovered so even if you did delete, a tech bloodhound could still restore those emails.
Let your colleague threaten all they like.
Moral of the story -keep work for work and personal for personal
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Thank you, Bob, yes, I know, we had been careless for using company email.
When I talked to my colleague, he claimed I did not make any deliberate attempt to hide our sensitive correspondence, and that I did keep it deliberately in order for the management to view them and hurt his position. I told him repeatedly that there is no truth to this. I intended to clean up my mailbox for one last time but then the company cut my notice short by informing me that I need to take the garden leave right away, and having announced that to me literally guarded me and escorted me out the door ( i learned this is a company policy when you are moving to a competitor)
Am I liable for any damages to my colleague? I am also worried of what this would do to my current background check with the new company, which I know is in progress.
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[UPDATE] Please note that fee quotes stated in historic postings may be out-of-date.
Based on the fact given, your colleague does not appear to have any cause of action against you. Your colleague introduced the offer of the new company to you through company email first and by doing so he should have assumed the risk of disclosure to the management. The company has access to the work email accounts and it does not matter whether you have deleted the conversations or not.
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