Careful with your old email contacts when you change jobs...

Thursday 04 September 2014

The Royal Court has issued a landmark ruling that employees cannot copy email databases to take with them when they leave for a new job - but lawyers say that bosses should beware of workers harvesting company contact lists through LinkedIn.

The ruling – in the case of a recruitment company against three former employees and their new boss – means that it is unlawful for an employee to copy a list of contacts from their Microsoft Outlook folder to take with them to a new employer. But the same rule does not apply to LinkedIn contacts, because the user agreement stipulates that the account belongs to the user, not their boss.

The Court found that it was not relevant that individual contact details might be available on the internet or social media sites, and that a collection of email folders can constitute a database protected by copyright.

Elena Moran, the Collas Crill partner who represented the recruitment company, Nautech, said that lists of contacts were important to businesses.

She said: “This case should be a warning to all employers to ensure that they put in place an agreement with the employee that all rights to the LinkedIn account are assigned to the employer and that the employee has no right to take the contact information with them when they leave.

“The proliferation of mobile devices and home working makes it increasingly difficult for companies to stop their data being copied by employees. In many cases employers will want employees to have work contacts on their mobile phones or home computers so that they are always available.

“Even if the data is on an office workstation computer it takes minutes to export an copy onto a mobile device huge quantities of data that it has taken the employer months or years to collect.”