Are email signatures legally meaningful?
It’s probably considered a contract of adhesion and if it’s reasonable and to be expected it would probably stand up in court (IANAL and emphasis on probably), assuming you didn’t immediately send an email back rejecting the provisions it would probably be ok. But I think it’s mostly there as a warning to anyone that might accidentally get the email rather than the intended recipient.
It is important, I think, to distinguish between a disclaimer being a legally enforceable contract document and a disclaimer having a desired effect in a subsequent legal proceeding. One of the most frustrating things that happens regularly in corporate litigation is that a party’s e-mail correspondence is stored or produced in a manner that does not give any conclusive indication of who, exactly, sent an e-mail and in what context the e-mail was sent. This is becoming more and more frustrating as electronic discovery becomes a key part of complex and even non-complex litigation. If you have an automatic signature in your work e-mail, then in a few years when all of your e-mail is discoverable in a lawsuit, it will be more readily apparent who sent what to whom, particularly in long e-mail send/reply chains. If the person sending the e-mail is an attorney, they may want their signature block to include a statement regarding the confidentiality of their attorney-client communications, w
Email signatures intended to impose confidentiality or some other duty on the recipient probably won’t work. However, an email signature intended merely to assure that the recipient knows some fact (e.g. We do not have an attorney-client relationship, and even if we did, this email does not constitute professional advice) are much more likely to be effective. Think about it this way: to sue the lawyer for giving you bad advice in the email, you have to convince the court or jury that you thought he was your lawyer and the email contained legal advice meant for you. If the email specifically said that he wasn’t and it didn’t, it gets just that much harder to make out a claim.
