E-mail training experts say that when writing e-mail for business, prevention is always cheaper than the cure.

San Francisco, CA (PRWeb) December 15, 2006 -- On December 1st, the US Federal Government passed new rules requiring that companies keep better track of their e-mail communications and instant messages (IM) in case of litigation. In the event of a federal lawsuit, both sides must now produce "electronically stored information" as part of what's known as e-discovery, the sharing of evidence before a trial. The bad news is that if your business is ever required to produce electronic records as evidence, you will probably end up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars - prior to any legal fees - just sifting through the backlog of e-mail records and copying those that might be relevant to the case.


"Then there is the matter of what you will find," say Karen Leland and Keith Bailey, creators of the The Essential E-mail Training, the online e-mail training program and authors of the bestselling business book, Customer Service For Dummies - 3rd Edition, "Many businesses we have worked with have been shocked to discover the vast amount of inappropriate, unethical and unprofessional writing contained in e-mail messages that their staff have been sending both internally to coworkers and externally to customers, vendors and others outside the company." Politicians, CEOs and software companies have hit the headlines in recent months because they were apparently unaware of some basic electronic communication guidelines.

According to Leland and Bailey - who have had over 30,000 people from some of America's biggest corporations attend their live e-mail training program or view the online version - prevention is always cheaper than the cure. "Our clients take a preventative approach to e-mail issues," says Keith Bailey. "By training their staff in the proper business e-mail writing and IM writing, companies have an immediate - and low cost - impact on what they communicate electronically and the opportunity to prevent problems before they end up as part of a potentially costly court case."

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