2002 was the Year of Corporate Scandal. But really it wouldn't be fair to give all the credit to grasping, conniving executives and malevolent, sneaky bookkeepers. No, as those corporate honchos offer their plea bargains, they'll all be able to name an accomplice: e-mail. For prosecutors, it has become the star witness or perhaps an even better weapon than that. Think of e-mail as the corporate equivalent of DNA evidence, that single hair left at the crime scene that turns the entire case. In theory you can explain it away, but good luck trying. So ubiquitous has the smoking e-mail become that some lawyers have taken to calling it 'evidence mail'. Who knew that a nation could become so transfixed by writing? There was the Stephen King of e-mail prose whose output was as prolific as it was haunting. Former Salomon Smith Barney analyst Jack Grubman favored a terser style-he's reportedly a BlackBerry man-for what he would later claim were his fictional musings. But literary style notwithstanding, their e-mails shared a common plot: jacking up stock ratings to please investment-bank clients. Does anybody think the nation's biggest brokerages would have agreed to hand over $1.5 billion in settlements if not for this electronic paper trail? Nor was the pox limited to the Wall Street houses. Like forgotten land mines, unfortunate e-mails involving Enron, WorldCom, Qwest, Global Crossing, and Tyco exploded sporadically throughout the year. There was even damaging e-mail about e-mail, as happened with the J.P. Morgan Chase banker who warned a colleague to "shut up and delete this e-mail." But even that seemingly obvious fix can bring its own perils. Five big Wall Street brokerages coughed up $8.25 million in fines in December for failing to preserve electronic messages, as securities rules require. And one cannot forget Arthur Andersen, whose destruction of Enron-related transmissions led to a criminal conviction and eventually to the accounting firm's implosion. While the degree of punishment was exceptional, the fact of it wasn't: Judges are increasingly imposing penalties on companies that can't turn over old e-mails when the court demands them. And so it boils down to this, to borrow an old phrase: Companies can't live with e-mail, and they definitely can't live without it. As we've seen it's increasingly a legal albatross--and, at the very least, a fast track to public humiliation. But then it's also the most important business technology since the advent of the telephone. It's invaluable in allowing far-flung offices to communicate and it lets employees work from anywhere. It has freed us from the tyranny of phone tag and given us an effortless way to transmit lengthy documents without so much as a busy fax signal. If you have any doubt how much the technology has worked its way into your daily life, just ask yourself this: How many times a day do you check your e-mail? 

