Date: Sat, 14 Aug 93 13:48:47 EDT
From: jueneman%wotan(_at_)gte(_dot_)com
I don't think our attorneys are any more conservative or
technology-averse than anywhere else, but they are concerned about
protecting the company from all sorts of hypothetical kinds of harm.
They aren't being negative or scornful, they are asking what seems to
them to be a perfectly reasonable question.
I will make the observation that despite the large potential for
forgeries and other dirty tricks that can be played using nothing more
technologically sophisticated as "MacDraw" and a fax modem, the use of
FAXes in everyday business transactions is extremely common. There are
even vendors who will ship me products with nothing more than a fax'ed
copy of a purchase order from MIT, even though something like that is
trivially easy to forge, and which MIT could easily repudiate if it was
forged. And yet, I haven't heard of any cases where attorneys have
advised their clients to throw away all of their fax machines!
Perhaps your attorneys are being overly paranoid here --- or perhaps you
are ascribing to your attorneys more legal caution than they really
have, or which might really be appropriate.
- Ted