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eDisclaimer

eDisclaimer is a hyperlinked email disclaimer repository

Email disclaimers cause problems for Archiving, Retention, eDiscovery and Supervision processes and polices. Our solution eliminates these issues and offers the following features:

  • Fully compliant with a broad range of regulatory requirements
  • Provides the legal protection required for corporate emails
  • Drastically reduces erroneously flagged content during e-discovery
  • Eliminates retention of items based on keywords in an email disclaimer removing the burden to archival storage
  • Legally defensible authentication of linked content
  • Managed repository includes all disclaimers used by an institution, including multi-lingual and conditional variations such as e-messaging and social networking disclaimers

The Challenges of Email Disclaimers

Virtually all financial institutions attach disclaimers to outgoing email but managing these disclaimers creates significant issues.

  • If the corporate disclaimer is attached at the firewall, then the archived message may not contain the disclaimer. This is an important issue for regulatory and legal e-discovery.
  • The disclaimer may not match the language of the email and, thus, may not be a legally binding disclaimer.
  • If the disclaimer is attached at the firewall, it may not correspond to the disclaimer used in Instant Messaging platforms like Bloomberg, Teams or Slack.
  • Most institutions have no facility in place to prove the ‘chain-of-custody’ of the disclaimer and thus their disclaimers are not legally defensible.
  • Words in the disclaimer are often mistakenly ‘flagged’ by supervisory / monitoring software resulting in eDiscovery teams wasting countless hours reviewing compliant messages.
  • The archiving of a much greater amount of mail than necessary due to disclaimer language attached to every email and IM. Some estimates are that disclaimers add as much as 15% to corporate archives.

eDisclaimer eliminates these issues and ensures compliance.

Email
17a-4’s Email Compliance Solution

eDisclaimer is our hyperlinked email disclaimer service that:

  • is fully compliant
  • provides the legal protection required for corporate emails
  • removes the burden to archival storage
  • drastically reduces erroneously flagged content during eDiscovery
  • saves time and money
17a-4 will configure your custom eDisclaimer.

Each sent email will contain your custom hyperlink.

eDis

eDis email hyperlink

The linked URL has the disclaimer language, timestamp and is fully customizable including logos and fonts.

eDisclaimer

A Deeper Dive into Disclaimers and our Legally Defensible eDisclaimer solution

Regulations insist that institutions attach a disclaimer to all corporate emails. Email disclaimers are necessary to protect rights and responsibilities of a firm but can prove burdensome to Compliance and IT. This is especially true when time is of the essence in response to an SEC or FINRA regulatory request for an e-discovery production.

The keyword problem

The language of a legal disclaimers, words like confidential, privacy, guarantee etc., are necessary for the intended protections and to comply with governing laws and regulations. However, these exact words and terms are often included in lexicons used to monitor bad behavior or nefarious business practice.  So endless amounts of emails can be unnecessarily flagged by regulatory supervisory systems (FINRA Rule 3110 and IAA 203).  These data exports are then sent to outside counsel for culling thus increasing costs of legal reviews and e-discovery productions.

The archive problem

All this flagged content is being archived along with the email’s full text.  The result was a large amount of usable archive space occupied by inconsequential content at a considerable cost. Full text email disclaimers can account for as much as 15% of space in an institutions archive. A hyperlinked solution simply eliminates the flagging and retention of these items in the archive.

So many variations

Many institutions require multiple disclaimers due to departmental requirements and international corporate laws. Disclaimers must fit applicable government regulations and contain appropriate language. The organization must also provide the testimony of authentication and the verification of the “chain of custody”.  In short, what disclaimer was used when.

Our solution

17a-4’s eDisclaimer addresses the legal and regulatory requirements for implementing hyperlinked email disclaimers, specifically the defensible authentication of the linked connection. Most hyperlinked disclaimers being used in corporate email cannot provide the required authentication and, as a result, are not legally enforceable.  If an organization simply deploys a hyperlink to a webpage with a full disclaimer, they have failed to authenticate the connection and are not legally defended. There is no verifiable proof that, at the time of the email, the specific disclaimer was valid and linked. The legality of the disclaimer is negated unless each email can be proven to connect to a specific e-disclaimer, as it reads at the time of attachment.

17a-4’s eDisclaimer proves the integrity of the hyperlink by managing a repository on behalf of clients.  The repository contains all disclaimers used by an institution, including multi-lingual and conditional variations such as e-messaging and social networking disclaimers.