UK: Is it legal to present in court a document/evidence which you are not allowed to keep? Imagine an employee whose contract requires to return all copies of employer's information back to employer once employment is over. But that employee is going to take the former employer into Employment Tribunal and for this needs to keep copies of some emails as vital evidence? Is this legal? Or does it mean that employee will be in breach of his/her contract?
Is this legal? Yes Or does it mean that employee will be in breach of his/her contract? Yes You are assuming that if the evidence is allowed to be presented then that automatically means that keeping it for that purpose is not a breach of the contract. This is not necessarily so; it can be both at the same time. That said, it is unlikely that an employer would attempt to sanction an employee for this as the courts would (rightly) see it as an attempt to pervert the course of justice. As in most things in the law it is possible for all parties in a matter to be on the wrong side of it. If you want to come to the tribunal with "clean hands" then the best thing to do is make a record (not a copy) of the relevant documents and return then to the employer. Before going to the tribunal get your solicitor to subpoena the documents that you want - they will have to produce them and you have them without breaking your contract.
Yes, it triggers the GDPR obligations Considerations: Can you surely identify those residing in Europe? In that case you should ask them to sign up again and confirm the consent. A lot of mailing lists are doing just that. Did they previously give consent and you can document it? If so, then you can argue that you have the required consent. Do you have business in Europe? If not then I don't think they would bother to go after you. You could just walk away from the fine. What other personal informastion are you storing? If you know who reside in Europe then you already have more info than just the email. The email address itself wouldn't be much of a documentation issue, SAR or Portability task.
If an employee takes home information that his or her employer considers confidential, that would be a matter of company policy. The employer could discipline or fire the employee if it learned of the incident, and chose to act. If the information is considered to be a trade secret, or part of one, disclosing it or mishandling it so as to risk disclosure could be a crime under US law. However, only in unusual cases is criminal action taken on such matters, normally it is left to civil lawsuits or internal company action. I do not know if Canada has a similar law.
The solicitor is allowed not to accept a case. If your ex-wife asked him to prepare papers, and he feels that she is getting ripped off, it is absolutely understandable that he won't prepare these papers for her, because he doesn't want to be sued or badmouthed when the deal goes wrong. "We would also reserve the right to take our own professional advice as to our efforts on your behalf." means simply he is not specialised in some subject, and will prefer to ask someone who is. Like a medical doctor asking for a second opinion before going ahead and cutting your leg off. Now I would have preferred if the solicitor had said concretely what exactly is wrong with the contract. Also, it would be obvious that you would be very comfortable with anything that he would advice her against. If he thinks that it is a good deal for you but not for her, he should advice against it. (Your comment to another question seems to indicate that she should be paid a lot more than you offered, so her solicitor seems to have been perfectly right).
Is there any way I can defend myself against penalties when mistakes are made in my favor? Another option, in a similar vein to your suggestions, is to make a contemporaneous record of the conversations. Then send an email* to the public official detailing what was said and agreed, along with a request that they reply with any observations or amendments within a certain time frame. That way you have a date-stamped document properly addressed to the other party to use as evidence or leverage. *or a recorded delivery letter etc
&quot;May&quot; means &quot;is possible&quot; and not &quot;is necessary&quot;. The specific law does not say anything about a person doing A, B or C and it does not say that if you do one of A, B or C then something mandatorily follows. It asserts that certain types of documentation &quot;can&quot; be used as evidence supporting the proposition that the applicant did not disrupt continuous residence, but it also asserts (without giving any further hints) that other things may be used. This law does not state necessary or sufficient conditions for establishing undisrupted continuous residence. It is not hard to construct a scenario where a person moves back to their home country and ran for public office there, but failed to quit the US job. In light of compelling evidence that they actually moved back home, failure to quite your US job is not proof that you remained in the US. Proof resides in the totality of evidence, not just the admissibility of a single fact. Doing one or more of (A-D) is no guarantee of anything.
With respect to the first question, discussing an idea in a non-encrypted email is not a publication that forfeits the right to patent an idea, even though it is not 100% secure. In the same way, talking about an idea for a patent with your patent lawyer in a secluded booth of a coffee shop in person does not constitute publication of the idea for this purpose, even if someone is secretly spying on you at the time. Since I am at the moment employed by a company, even though the idea originates from myself, it seems that I should quit my job first not to have my current company have any claim over my idea. It is possible that the contract makes even ideas that you come up with yourself while employed by the company the property of the company. If so, you are legally in the wrong and the idea belongs to the company. But, proving the reality that you are stealing the idea from the company is harder if there is nothing in writing. An email discussing an idea while you are employed would have to be disclosed in litigation with your employer over whether the patent applied for belongs to you or to your employer under an employment agreement. If you didn't put it in an email, it wouldn't exist to turn over in litigation.
does the email chain above set out a legally binding contract, would it stand up to the test in a court Generally speaking, yes, unless you signed a "more formal" contract thereafter. The more formal contract would supersede the email chain. Furthermore, the subsequent conduct by both parties evidences the existence of a contract. The fact that you have been provided with the service and that you have been charged for these ~12 months evidences the formation and existence of a contract. is the breach of contract sufficient to give us grounds to terminate the contract? Yes. To substantiate a claim of breach of contract, you will need to provide evidence that the "24/7/365 support line" is missing or unacceptably subpar in that it has caused you losses (such as downtime and consequent impact on your operations), or that such pattern of service disruptions would subject your company to imminent risk of losses if you were forced to stay in the contract for the remaining ~24 months (obviously, you will need to establish that this item or feature is not just incidental to the contract).