Disclaimer for email
There is considerable scope for the content of an email, or the sending of an email, to generate legal issues for a company. This may be with respect to a breach of someone else’s confidentiality, libellous, inappropriate or defamatory statements made in an email by a member of the company, or accidentally transferring a virus or entering into a binding agreement via email. Using an email disclaimer can protect against these and other legal consequences of sending emails. The language of the disclaimer should be included at the end of every email that is sent from the company and, to be safe, also in every response to an email that has been sent to the company.
The disclaimer for emails covers the basic forms of legal protection against the consequences of using email. These are:
- Limitation of liability for the delivery or content of the email
- Limitation on the actions of a recipient who receives the email in error
- Limitation of liability for virus transmission
- No employee or agent is authorised to enter into a binding agreement via email (optional)
- The views of the sender are not those of the organisation (optional)
- Compulsory statement for a limited company, including company number and registered address
Website Disclaimer
Adding a disclaimer to your website is essential. It won’t cover you for every eventuality but helps protecting your organisation and restrict liability. It’s your way of stating the terms under which you are working with the people.
Where to publish it
It’s important that disclaimers are obvious and visible, ideally on every page of your site, typically at the bottom of a page. If people can’t find it, they won’t read it and it may not offer you the necessary protection.
Disclaimer with provision for the traffic
In addition to the substantive information above, when putting together a disclaimer for a web site, the traffic on that site must be made to flow through the disclaimer. This means that visitors to the site must have to go through a screen containing the disclaimer so that the publisher may have some basis to argue that the visitor entered into a “contract” with the publisher that included that the visitor used the information on the site with full knowledge of and agreement with the disclaimer.
The value of disclaimers depends upon the skill with which they are drafted and resort to some form copied from another work may turn out to be legally ineffective.
Juris Logium provides drafting and reviewing services for the Disclaimer.
