I will be the first to admit that with all of the new generations of iPhones that have come out, it is sometimes hard to remember all of their features.
From texting to e-mail, Facebook to Twitter, and a million more apps and features, there are near countless ways to communicate with your friends and family. But when it comes to your colleagues or business associates, might I humbly suggest you use the oldest iPhone feature of them all, the voice call.
I recognize this is no simple feat. I often fire off a litany of profanity in my head every time someone calls instead of sending me a text. After all, who really wants to talk on the phone or even has time for such an antiquated form of human communication?
But as your in-house counsel, I begging with you, nay, pleading with you, think twice before you put your thoughts down in an e-mail and hit send to a colleague.
In our organization, we like to coach our team members not to put anything in an e-mail they would be embarrassed to read about in the newspaper.
While it may seem like a stretch for an e-mail sent by a random employee to ever merit a mention in the news, I can assure you it is much easier than it sounds.
From an ill-advised joke at a patient’s expense, to a member of the executive team advocating for some cost-saving measures which have the potential to compromise patient care, it is astonishing how one e-mail or text can call the integrity of an organization into question if reported publicly.
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In addition to creating a public relations nightmare, a flippant e-mail has the potential put your organization at risk for legal trouble as well.
Our team was recently called in to help negotiate a contract on behalf of one of our divisions. A rather simple and straightforward task, until opposing counsel gleefully shared several e-mail chains with us wherein one of our executives had given away the proverbial farm last week.
Sure those e-mails were not legally binding, but you can bet they put our team at a significant disadvantage out of the gate when opposing counsel was able to quite literally use our own words against us.
In addition to hampering active negotiations, on more than one occasion, poorly composed or worded e-mails have come back to haunt us during the daunting discovery process. Even a one word acknowledgement of something in an e-mail chain can be enough to doom a case.
I get it. In the modern era where we carry around a computer in our pocket and sit in front of a keyboard all day, it is easier to quickly respond in writing to a colleague or peer. Plus it has the advantage of saving of the need for mundane small-talk.
But please, think twice before you hit send. There is no telling how the end recipient or future opposing counsel may interpret your simple e-mail.
So while I anxiously await my delivery of the iPhone X and brim with excitement of all the new features it claims to possess, I promise to test its most basic feature first, the voice call.
Stephen R. Williams is in-house counsel with a multi-facility hospital network in the Midwest. His column focuses on a little talked about area of the in-house life, management. You can reach Stephen at [email protected].