Update on New Jersey Case Concerning the Privacy of E-mails on Work Computers
Last year, the New Jersey Supreme Court heard arguments in Stengart v. Loving Care Agency, Inc. (A-16-09), a case concerning the privacy of employees’ personal e-mail on employers’ computers. The Star-Ledger reports that the court has ruled (pdf) for an employee, Marina Stengart, against her former workplace, Loving Care Agency of Ridgefield Park.
A company should not have read e-mails a former employee wrote to her lawyer from a private, password-protected web account, even though she sent them from her employer’s computer, according to a state Supreme Court ruling today that attorneys said could influence workplace privacy rules across the country.
The precedent-setting ruling upheld the sanctity of attorney-client privilege in electronic communications between a lawyer and a nursing manager at the Loving Care Agency. After the manager quit and filed a discrimination and harassment lawsuit against the Bergen County home health care company in 2008, Loving Care retrieved the messages from the computer’s hard drive and used them in preparing its defense.
The unanimous decision by the state’s highest court will have broader implications in workplaces, which increasingly rely on e-mail and the internet, according to litigators on both sides of the case. [...]
The ruling stems from a harassment and discrimination lawsuit Marina Stengart of Bergen County filed three years ago against Loving Care of Ridgefield Park. Stengart, then the executive director of nursing, sent her attorney eight e-mails from her company-loaned laptop about her issues with her superiors. Stengart used her Yahoo e-mail account.
“Under all of the circumstances, we find that Stengart could reasonably expect that e-mails she exchanged with her attorney on her personal, password-protected, web-based e-mail account, accessed on a company laptop, would remain private,’’ Chief Justice Stuart Rabner wrote in the decision, which upholds an appeals court’s ruling last year.
“Stengart plainly took steps to protect the privacy of those e-mails and shield them from her employer,” Rabner continued. “She used a personal, password protected e-mail account instead of her company e-mail address and did not save the account’s password on her computer.”
Possibly related posts:
April 1st, 2010 at 9:00 pm
[...] Depending on the size of the company, I would not envy its security detail, because the use of email has become so popular these days. [...]