Keywords To Avoid In Emails – Results Of Lehmans Brothers Investigations

Johannes Scholtes writing on the Zylab blog presents some interesting discussions about e-discovery technology and how it has been employed by investigators to search through over 4 million emails authored by failed investment bank, Lehman Brothers. In particular, he describes how specific keywords were used to isolate potentially incriminating evidence:

“While I did some additional research, I found some great articles that I thought were worth sharing: http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/23/lehman-brothers-sec-email-opinions-kevi… discusses how more than 34 million pages of internal Lehman documents, including 4.4 million e-mails were searched by the investigators. At the end of the day, they came up with various words that triggered “interesting emails”. This list included words such as: –”risk” , –”concern”, –”let’s discuss”, –”just between us”, –”breach”, –”big trouble”, –”too late”, and last but not least: –”stupid”.” [Read More]

Johannes cites a number of related articles and makes the highly valid point that anything you write in an email may subsequently end up being used as evidence in court.

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