Epistolary Incontinence

Sarcastic term used to describe the excessive use of e-mail for all sorts of communications – though recently one politician in particular has demonstrated that other media such as Twitter can prove equally damaging. It is a source of concern for legal advisors due to the tendency of sufferers to say or confess unwise and potentially incriminating things, which may also be factually inaccurate, or in one notable case, undermine their own defence. Due to the difficulty of removing all copies of an e-mail from backups, local hard drives, etc., such correspondence appears with amusing frequency in litigation (provided it’s not you or your client who wrote the e-mail.) Often sufferers exhibit this behaviour in the form of Wiggums, compulsive twittering or posting to Facebook and other fora.

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