Work - WAH Business Archive 06-07

Failure to cross and dot the legal Ts and Is on emails & websites could cost

08 Jan 2007

Failure to cross and dot the legal Ts and Is on emails and websites could cost you dear

Thousands of UK companies risk fine because of failure to obey new European law on website and email descriptions.

Many companies in the UK have missed a January 1 deadline to update their websites and email signatures to include new information that is necessary because of European law being incorporated into UK law. Directors of companies that breach the new Companies Act risk a fine.

Small and medium size companies are particularly at risk of fines as most do not currently include all of the essential information in their email signatures. Every company needs to list its company registration number, place of registration and registered office address on its website and in emails. Such information is already required on 'business letters' but the new
regulations extend it to websites, order forms and electronic documents, including email.

The new law is as a result of the UK government implementing a European law, the First Company Law Amendment, into UK law. The Companies (Registrar, Languages and Trading Disclosure) Regulations 2006 came into force on January 1.

Basically, every company email signature should now include:

• Company name and geographic address, including both the trading and registered names if these are different. Both the trading address and the registered office address must be give, although for most micro companies the two are likely to be the same.
• Company registration number and place of registration (e.g. company registered in England and Wales).
• If a business is a member of a trade or professional association, membership details (including any registered number) should be shown.
• If the business has a VAT number it should be stated (prefixed with GB if it trades outside the UK)

In addition, keep an eye on your email disclaimers because when a disclaimer or confidentiality notice is added to every email a company sends out then there is a risk that a court would consider that the warning has been diluted. This means that it might be better to have a selection of email disclaimers in your saved signatures, or for different employees or departments (if such things exist in your comoany!), which of course means you need to use mail software that allows you to set different disclaimers for different types of email.

And finally...have you updated your website copyright to 2007 yet? Easy to forget, yet doing so leaves your content wide open to being ripped off, so the Legal Eagles tell me. I just think old copyrights look sloppy, especially for new companies and small brands where people may have found you via hotlinks from other sites or search engines.?? Because let'ss face it, if someone trips over your site during a search and they've never heard of you before, there is a chance they'll scroll down to your copyright to see how long you've been around...and a copyright reading (c) 1998-2007 is inherently more trustworthy than one that reads (c) 2005.??

OK, and I'm no angel polishing her halo while preaching... I had to run around and update all Funky's stuff too! ;)

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