How do I back up and organize emails in preparation for a work dispute?

November 23, 2007 1:45 PM

I need to use old emails to support my case in a dispute at work. How should I organize and present them?

A bad situation at work has gotten exponentially worse in the past few weeks. A few of my co-workers and I are working with HR to set up a meeting with our increasingly horrible boss and her boss. We are sure that she is going to deny everything that she has been doing lately (like pitting us against each other, revealing confidential medical info about one of us to the others, and purposely frustrating us in our jobs to try to get us to quit) and probably make stuff up about us as well. Fortunately, I have 3 years worth of emails from her, as well as my emails to her (in Outlook). These emails go a long way toward showing that I have been a valued employee who has been responsible for some major projects in our department. I have myriad emails where she expresses her gratitude and satisfaction with my performance ("Thanks! You're awesome! I love you!") Since I have never had a performance review, and there is nothing positive or negative in my HR file, these emails are pretty significant.

I am planning on backing them all up to an external HD, but then I need to organize them and figure out the best way to use them to my advantage in this meeting and any subsequent meetings. Should I print them out and put them in a binder by theme? Should I put them on a disc? Things are so bad that I think lawyers are going to get involved at some point, so anything I do should ideally work in that context as well.

I wish I could be more specific, but I'm obviously trying to protect myself here. Thanks in advance!

posted by anonymous to computers & internet (6 answers total)

IANAL, but when I worked for one, for use in discovery, usually they were printed and included as enclosures to the filing. I live in Texas, and so I have no clue what they do in other states, or even if what the firms I worked for did the same thing as every other firm. That's for legal stuff, obviously, not for presenting them internally. Of course, if the validity of the emails needed to be verified, they'd need them electronically.
posted by fructose at 2:26 PM on November 23, 2007

There are files with the extension PST somewhere in your outlook directory or somewhere. You can simply copy those away and keep them as a backup. Depending on how your outlook is setup, it's possible that you don't have these files, but it's quite likely that you do. Go search for "backing up outlook email" and I'm sure you'll find what you need.
posted by cschneid at 2:37 PM on November 23, 2007

How about you just pull together excerpts from them and attach the originals for reference.

As in, you put together a document which says "In January 2004 she referred to me as such-and-such [see attached page 23]". Nobody wants to read the actual emails except to check you're not making them up.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 2:48 PM on November 23, 2007

No, you can do better than that. Count the number of emails you received from your boss and classify their content. For example, "in the last three years I received 259 emails from Boss. Of these, 130 contained commentary on the quality of my work, 93% of which was positive."

AmbroseChapel is correct in that no-one will have time to read them all except a brief check. You can greatly aid your case by presenting a summary of the overall content of the e-mails. Just be very careful; be as objective as possible so no-one can accuse you of distorting the truth.
posted by PercussivePaul at 3:01 PM on November 23, 2007

This probably won't be an issue, but if you plan to use email for evidence, there are some specific things you might need to do. For example, you need to be able to demonstrate that they haven't been tampered with in any way. You might also need to provide them in a format that's readable without Outlook.

For the first issue, you might ask your network administrator to archive some or all of your mailbox to CD/DVD. In the case of Outlook, this would involve creating a PST file from the contents of your Exchange mailbox (assuming you're using Exchange). For the second, you might convert your mailbox, or selective contents of your mailbox, to PDF - Acrobat 8 does this very nicely, giving you a searchable, easily read file.

Then, of course, you'll need to go through and note the ones you think are most useful to you. If you're using PDF, you can create bookmarks for these specific messages I think. Otherwise, just write them down. If you simply keep the PST file, it's easy enough to find messages in it by loading it in any copy of Outlook.
posted by me & my monkey at 6:43 PM on November 23, 2007

I'd print anything applicable. Then you have a printed copy you can use at trial. It's always possible someone at work can delete what you are depending on as evidence.
posted by unrepentanthippie at 10:15 PM on November 24, 2007