Can email be used as a legal document?

What is the name of your state? georgia

I am being outsourced from one company to another. The contract between the two companies is confidential and not accessible to any of the outsourced employees. I do have an email from the company I am being outsourced to indicating some of the provisions in the contract. Is the email I have a valid document to use in a court of law if these provisions are not satisfied?

It may be used depending on the situation of course the opposing side could challenge, If I were you I would do several things, Keep a copy on your email server, print a hard copy, save a copy to disc, since this will likely be on the server for what will be your old company and you will lose access to that account, reply by email doing all of what I have mentioned and cc it as appropriate and Bcc it to your own private email account, save it to disc. Also print out the copy of your response, make copies and mail the hard copy crrr usps. It is important to have an untouched copy on a server to prove nothing was altered if there is a challenge.

This is something an attorney is best equipped to advise you on but I believe the issue is whether all the conditions of a contract are met - not whether or not the terms and conditions are laid out in an e-mail (assuming the validity of the source isn't challenged.)

Answer to your first question: Email can be used in court as evidence under certain conditions.

Answer to your implied second question: Your emails cannot be used to prove the existence of a valid contract (or its contents) between two parties, neither of which are you. You'd need a copy of the actual, whole contract, and even then, you'd need a way to authenticate it.

The answer to your question is yes, in my state, but I don't know how universal that is.

cbg said:

The answer to your question is yes, in my state, but I don't know how universal that is.

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The answer to which question?

The literal question, as asked in the opening post to the thread.

The e-mail could NOT be used as a legal contract, since a contract is a document that must be signed by both parties. However, it would be able to be used as EVIDENCE in your case.

cbg said:

The literal question, as asked in the opening post to the thread.

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LOL, that's my point - he asked two actual questions: "Can email be used as a legal document?" and "Is the email I have a valid document to use in a court of law if these provisions are not satisfied?" and one implied question: "Can I use this email I got as evidence in court to prove the existence of a valid contract between two other people"?


I think he's mixing up "evidence" and "contract".

I try to avoid answering implied questions in many cases. That involves making assumptions of what they are actually looking for; often they themselves don't fully know what it is that they want. The only question he actually asked was, "Is the email I have a valid document to use in a court of law if these provisions are not satisfied?" I answered that question literally to the best of my ability. If you want to answer implied questions, go right ahead. I made it clear that I was only answering the question actually stated.

Edited to include:

BTW, you may well be right that he's mixing up his terms, which is one reason I wanted to stay clear of any implications.