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E-MAIL MAY HOLD A NEW SURPRISE

Imagine yourself at the computer scanning the subject lines of your current batch of incoming emails. Your eye gets drawn to one in particular because it's from someone you know or perhaps it has a catchy subject line that says you have won a million dollars in the state lottery, or a named relative has passed away and someone is trying to contact you. For whatever reason, you open the email only to discover it contains documents that declare you have been legally served and that you must now appear in court. Surprise! The misleadingly titled email is like the clever process server who sneaks by security disguised as a pizza deliverer and serves you both the pizza and the summons. But wait a minute. Is e-mailing a summons legal? Doesn't a processes server have to physically hand you a summons? Not according to a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that recently upheld a lower court's ruling that it's legal to email a summons.

In that particular case, an off shore casino was being sued by another casino claiming a trademark infringement. But the offshore casino could not be reached by traditional methods. With no physical address nor telephone number, it was determined that the company had intentionally restricted its contact to the outside world and was only accessible via an email address. In this particular circumstance, the ruling sanctioned the email delivery of legal documents and so far only applies to persons or companies that cannot be contacted by any other method. Lawyers also cited another ruling that allowed a telex or fax to be used in the service process saying that the courts "cannot be blind to the changes and advances in technology."

I wonder however if this isn't opening a Pandora's box. Can the electronic delivery of legal documents become a bad thing? For example, when you see a person's original signature on a document, it conveys an impression that the document has been physically seen and handled by that individual. Yet there's legislation that will make an electronic representation of your signature legal and binding. There goes the personal touch. And while all of this can serve to more efficiently expedite business and legal transactions, could we also find ourselves being run over in the ever quickening process? Don't get me wrong. I'm a technology advocate and embrace the Internet's ability to interconnect all of us in new and exciting ways. For example, filing your tax return electronically is the only way you can prove to the IRS that you filed in a timely manner. E-filing also gets your refund back to you more quickly and is less subject to clerical errors that can occur when information is transcribed from paper tax forms into the IRS computers.

But you can't have a front without a back and receiving legal documents via email makes me wince just a bit. Given the current technology of email, there is no absolute way to confirm a document has been received let alone been actually read by the party receiving the email. But I'm sure that most of these technical issues will be eventually resolved. Consider all the problems associated with online shopping and credit card transactions via the Internet. It will never be perfect but then again what is? Most online transactions these days move quickly and without incident.

The transmission of legal documents is inevitable, will eventually become commonplace and I think that's a good thing. After all, the fear of the occasional snafu shouldn't slow down the careful progression of technology.