Email

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In the common law

Is email an electronic messaging system as contemplated by Section 12 of the 1992 ISDA? No, according to Greenclose v National Westminster Bank plc.

As a workflow regulator

An Outlook inbox is a serviceable to-do list (after a fashion: if your relationship with your mandated queue of things you are meant to do is like the JC’s it will be impressionistic at best) and a single annual folder is an oubliette into which everything goes that you have either dealt with or that you are past caring about, if you were ever presently caring about in the first place.

There is a certain sort of legal eagle who will diligently file every email into a dedicated subfolder. Actually, most legal eagles will do this, regardless of — will, ignorant and/or in denial about the fact that manually filing emails is the biggest waste of intellectual capital since the invention of human resources. It is antediluvian, as it commits you to a pre-defined taxonomy which might have made excellent sense when you created the emails, but will ber no relation to your enquiry when you come to retrieve them. If you want to pull together every example you have contracts of limited recourse wording when you filed them by deal, you are going to be rifling through a hell of a lot of virtual filing cabinets.

Emails come pre-loaded with metadata: from, to, cc, subject, attachments, date sent, date received. All email service providers data index your email archives, so retrieving by search is trivial and lightning-quick. You don’t need to impose any further taxonomy on top of that.

With the inbuilt metadata, it is easy to construct sophisticated Boolean searches: so {from:jc to:iolio subject:flannel Sent:08/2020 "ISDA crack drafting squad"} will pull up what you want with good accuracy in a split second.

And you can "save" that search, and use it as a virtual folder, and it will automatically pull back all future information you get without you having to do anything.

It also means the same email can be in several folders at once.

There is a reason there’s no Dewey Decimal System for the internet. Though, bless them, someone tried.

I have developed a self-enforcing prioritisation method called "if no one hassles me about it, it can't be that important." After all, whose problem is it if I haven’t answered their email?

This has worked fairly well for 20 years. I find it is especially good for filtering meeting requests. Best to keep people guessing whether you will show or not. Those who really care will call you.