Business | Legal disclaimers

Spare us the e-mail yada-yada

Automatic e-mail footers are not just annoying. They are legally useless

|NEW YORK |2 min read

“IF THIS e-mail is received in error, notify the sender immediately.” “This e-mail does not create an attorney-client relationship.” “Any tax advice in this e-mail is not intended to be used for the purpose of avoiding penalties under the Internal Revenue Code.” Many firms—The Economist included—automatically append these sorts of disclaimers to every message sent from their e-mail servers, no matter how brief and trivial the message itself might be.

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