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It's almost always the other party in the lawsuit who is subpoenaing your past communications. Your employer is being forced by the court to retrieve these; it
by lacker 5y ago
It's almost always the other party in the lawsuit who is subpoenaing your past communications. Your employer is being forced by the court to retrieve these; it isn't their choice. It is in fact possible for your personal communications to get subpoenaed for a lawsuit related to your work. But, the other party will need some evidence that you had a conversation on a personal device that relates to the lawsuit. They can't just subpoena something like "all communications by employees relating to terms X and Y."
Usually your employer would prefer that you not hand over your personal device. Because the other party is looking for some sort of "smoking gun" where employees admit that they think some corporate behavior is bad or breaking the law. The penalties for not cooperating here are bad enough, though, that companies will generally cooperate. And the situations where it's a personal device are relatively rare, usually it's just corporate devices.
Quitting the company doesn't change anything. You can still be subpoenaed after you leave the company and the court can force you to turn things over.
Source: I'm not a lawyer but I have had my communications subpoenaed from my time at both Google and Facebook and I have complained to many corporate lawyers about how stupid these rules are while they politely explained to me how the system works
- dheera 5y agoThis is stupid. Reformat your personal device every week as a habitual practice. Keep multiple personal devices. Use voice when possible so that wiretap laws protect you. Company should have no right to your family communications. I never use text.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cortesoft 5y agoI don’t know why you keep saying it is the company that is trying to access your communications. It isn’t. It is the courts ordering you to hand over your communication. If you delete something that the court has ordered you to turn over, they can and will charge you with contempt. Again, this isn’t your employer doing this. Your employer would love if you didn’t turn over anything, but they are legally required to cooperate and will get in a lot of trouble if they don’t do their part.
- dheera 5y agoWell no, just reformat your device regularly and habitually just out of your own practice. Don't use text. Use voice calls. Maintain inbox zero on your personal e-mail. That way if ordered by the legal system you'll only actually have at most 1 week of personal data and none of it will be text. You won't be deleting anything after their request, you will just hand over what you have, which is incidentally not much. Wiretapping laws prevent courts from getting your voice records, at least in CA.