When it comes to electronic data of any type, there can be no expectation of privacy when it comes to corporate or government-owned electronic communications. So says Tom Hatahway of Detroit-based Clark Hill PLC. "Never write or say anything in an electronic communication that you wouldn’t want to be presented as evidence in a lawsuit."

State and Federal law have been evolving to allow and require ever-more forms of electronic data to be available for e-discovery when litigation is involved. Now discoverable data may be on hard drives, servers, thumb and flash drives, smart phones, voice mail and data in its myriad forms. This data may be fixed in a single location, but is likely to be scattered over many corporate locations or even traveling around with employees anywhere in the world.

Brian Ziff, also of Clark Hill says that legal rulings in the past two years have brought substantive changes to what can be considered evidence: "Now, all the data that a company enters and e-mails are subject to discovery in litigation."

Read more in this article from the Detroit Free Press, Local legal experts address conference about text messaging rights.