Mann's lawyer had to advise him that discovery would include his own emails. If there is one iota of intent to mislead, it could bring down the house of global warming.
I sometimes am involved as a consultant on legal cases.
The problem here is that email has evolved in most people’s minds as the equivalent of a phone conversation, ephemeral and informal. Not of a formal letter.
So people chat and discuss things in email, and such communications are extremely easy to take out of context and portray a person as believing or doing something that just isn’t true. And email is forever.
On one recent case that lasted several years, all the parties involved were restricted by the attorney for our side from communicating via email for anything other than setting up a call or something otherwise innocuous. Amazingly difficult to work that way. Didn’t realize how dependent on email I’d gotten.
But the attorney was able to demonstrate how he’d won some very big cases based on incautious email that he’d been able to mine under discovery.