on receiving LEGAL emails from one's OWN lawyer: *NO FORWARD*

I just received an email from my lawyer about some
unimportant thing, and by knee-jerk I forwarded
it to my wife (as I do all of them from him, since
she handles records, etc).

Fine and dandy -- mutt works just fine.

Which, maybe, is the problem.

At the bottom of each email I get from him is
a standard "boilerplate":



| PURSUANT TO DEPARTMENT OF TREASURY CIRCULAR 230, THIS ELECTRONIC MAIL
| AND ANY ATTACHMENT HERETO, IS NOT INTENDED OR WRITTEN TO BE USED, AND
| MAY NOT BE USED BY THE RECIPIENT, FOR THE PURPOSES OF AVOIDING ANY
| FEDERAL TAX PENALTY WHICH MAY BE ASSERTED.
|
| THIS ELECTRONIC MAIL MAY BE SUBJECT TO THE ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGE OR
| THE ATTORNEY WORK PRODUCT PRIVILEGE OR OTHERWISE BE CONFIDENTIAL. ANY
| DISSEMINATION, COPYING OR USE OF THIS E-MAIL BY OR TO ANYONE OTHER THAN
| THE DESIGNATED AND INTENDED RECIPIENT(S) IS UNAUTHORIZED. IF YOU HAVE
| RECEIVED THIS MESSAGE IN ERROR, PLEASE DELETE IT FROM YOUR SYSTEM
| IMMEDIATELY.

For the first time actually *reading* this thing -- and having just
forwarded the email(!) -- it suddenly came to me that this
"attorney-client privilege", a very *valuable* (legal) privilege,
100% dissappears as soon as the communication becomes NOT confined
to just you and your lawyer.

That is, if you're involved in any kind of trial or suit, your
opponent can require you to hand over all such no-longer-100%-private
letters, emails, or ANYTHING *to* him!

Like someone sues you on the claim that some piece of software
you either wrote or use violates "his patent" on some algorithm
or the like, and you have to hire a lawyer, etc, etc, and
you end up forwarding one or of his emails off to, say, the very
anti-software-patent Stallman (rms) -- and then sometime later
in "discovery" you're required to hand over all that stuff --
well, you see the problem.

(ie, you likely end up *losing* the lawsuit!)


MY PROPOSAL FOR MUTT:

Some kind of user-settable regexp-slot that if filled-in, and
each time you give the command "forward this email"
it uses that regexp for searching the to-be-forwarded email,

and ends up matching somewhere in the letter, *then*: prints oout
a warning (user-settable) message (warning to you) and
then asking "are you ABSOLUTELY SURE that you want to
FORWARD this email?", requiring maybe a "yesyes" or
"ouioui" or "sisi" confirmation.

Any comments, suggestions, on this idea?

David

.

Relevant Pages

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