Are you on the Board and using either your personal or work email address to conduct Board business? If so, this may be a bad practice that can affect your personal and work lives. What do we recommend? Each board member should set up a brand new email address specifically for all board related items.

In many cases, board members and boards as a whole are dragged into lawsuits for a variety of reasons. When the attorneys are performing their discovery and looking into all pertinent information relating to a case, they can request access to your server in order to compile evidence. If your server is hosting either other personal email or if it is located on a business server, the attorneys will presumably have access to all of your other information. If we look at it from the other side as well, your employer, if they have any sort of data retention policy or in any way monitor your emails and digital communication, will have open and unfettered access to board business.

All of this can be avoided by signing up for a new gmail account to funnel all of your board emails and correspondence to. Setting this email address up now will save you heartache, embarrassment and inconvenience in the future.