Give us all of your documents... Except the ones you have.

[Duncan]
On Wednesday, November 28, 2007, your client, Mark Zandberg, posted an entry on his blog entitled "Why miss your weekly dose of intelligent humor?" In that entry he inserts a copy of an e-mail sent to him and a man named "Steve" from Marla Miller, Assistant Superintendent at Edmonds School District, dated March 24, 2006.

All documents created by District employees and maintained on District computer servers, including e-mail communications, are property of the District. Accordingly, we are now requesting that any and all such electronic documents that were obtained by Mr. Zandberg while he was employed by the Edmonds School District, or any time thereafter, and now in his custody and control, be returned to the District, through us. In addition, please instruct him to retain any documents that remain in his custody and control until the issues related to his claim have been resolved.

We trust that you will advise Mr. Zandberg accordingly.

This is a blog-related issue, not a constructive termination issue. Therefore, contacting my legal counsel is contrary to my earlier request that all blog-related issues should be directed to me, personally. I retained the services of legal counsel for the sole purpose of resolving the manner in which I was constructively terminated.

You are directing me to return documents now in my possession, except the documents in my possession. I suppose I could return everything once my "claim" has been resolved. But what happens if I choose not to resolve any claim? Do I retain such documents forever?

Your request is not specific enough. In order to return documents, I will need to know exactly which documents are being requested. Also, I am not a public agency, so the fee will be $.15 a page. I do not have staff assigned to such a task, so the response may take more than 45 days.

It is clear that the District seeks to reclaim letters of praise and commendation. The letter included in the blog entry mentioned above, was retained for the purpose of demonstrating that I was once appreciated by my employer for the work that I performed every day - particularly the work that I was juggling for many months. Will the District be applying a uniform standard to all current and former employees? Will all letters of appreciation have to be returned? Will all thoughtfully written documents expressing appreciation have to be returned to the District?

The District has every e-mail message I ever sent from my District email account, as well as every message I ever received. Why not just have your hard drive dissecting contractors or the District's network administrator print out every e-mail that ever made contact with me?

Editorial: There are a great many companies in the world that offer free server space for the storing of e-mail and data. Imagine if everyone in the District were to automatically send every piece of email ever received or sent to a G-mail account through Google. It takes only a few minutes to set up a new rule in Outlook where this can happen without any on-going effort on the user's part. Then, if you are ever constructively terminated, you can just draw upon the wealth of information at your fingertips - and not in your home.