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Re: Confidentiality notices on email messages

2011-07-13 17:51:54
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

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