Legal Question in Technology Law in Virginia

Re: Emails as Legal Documents

Emails are generally accepted into evidence the same as handwritten or typed documents. To get an email, or any writing, admitted into evidence, the party seeking its admission has to introduce "foundation" evidence tending to prove that the writing is genuine. There are also laws relating to the validity of "electronic signatures" (search google). Proving the validity and authorship of an email could require as little as a party's admission that he or she wrote the email, the testimony of the receiving party, or even a subpoena to the sender's ISP combined with an expert witness in forensic computing (to testify about the email's headers). The latter method is the most likely to be conclusively believed, but may not be cost-effective except in big-money cases.