Gold Bar, Wash. is an old mining town that lies about 50 miles northeast of Seattle in rural Snohomish County. It has one main road and a crumbling rail line that snakes its way along the shores of the Skykomish River.

On most days, Gold Bar is a quiet, little hamlet nestled in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. By and large, the town’s 2,000 inhabitants – mostly farmers, agricultural workers and small shopkeepers – manage to peacefully co-exist with one another without incident.

Hardly the place one would expect to be the scene of a grisly murder, but that’s just what happened in the pre-dawn hours of June 26, 2008.

Some time in the early morning, 31-year-old Brent Starr slipped into a house owned by his 46-year-old paramour, Debra Canady, and bludgeoned her live-in boyfriend, 49-year-old David Grimm, to death with a hammer. Mr. Grimm was asleep at the time of the attack.

On May 13, I testified as an expert witness for the defense and challenged the reliability of the most damning evidence against the defendants – several mobile phone text messages.

We’ve all sent, received or forwarded emails with jokes, emoticons and personal musings at one time or another in the hopes of getting a laugh out of our colleagues or in an ill-conceived effort to build intra-office camaraderie.

Such emails may seem amusing or even productive when you hit the send button, but they may not seem so a few years later when someone is called to the witness stand to testify about the intent behind a joke about a co-worker, a client or a business partner. Anyone who’s undergone cross examination knows that there isn’t anything fun or pleasant about the experience.
    
It’s vital to remember that everything written in an email can come back to haunt an organization during litigation. Operate under the assumption that anything an organization writes in an email can and will be found by the opposing party during the discovery phase of a trial. Organizations that understand this at the outset of the e-discovery process will save themselves a lot of time, money and aggravation when faced with a legal matter.