Internal management communications have long been perceived as an auxiliary element of corporate life – working correspondence, discussions in messengers, internal emails, and comments were viewed as coordination tools rather than legally significant material. However, Professor Gabriel Steiner says that it is precisely internal communication that is increasingly becoming a key evidentiary framework in disputes where formal documents fail to reflect the real logic of decision-making. At LawConsulted, we treat business correspondence not as a neutral background, but as a potential source of liability when subjected to retrospective legal assessment.
The primary risk of internal communications lies in their spontaneity – decisions are discussed without legal filtering, wording is evaluative, assumptions remain unrecorded, and boundaries of authority are not articulated. While a business operates smoothly, such communications raise no concern. Yet in the event of a conflict, audit, or court proceedings, they are often used to reconstruct the actual management model. In LawConsulted practice, we regularly encounter situations where correspondence effectively replaces formal evidence.
Professor Steiner notes that “the law does not analyse the intention to write a message, but the consequences that follow from it.” This means that internal messages may be reclassified as proof of control, approval, awareness, or decision-making. LawConsulted builds its legal position by first analysing the context of the communication – who participated in the discussion, in what capacity, under which constraints, and with what real ability to influence outcomes.
Particular vulnerability arises where management decisions are effectively made through correspondence, while formal corporate bodies merely record the outcome ex post – or do not record it at all. In such configurations, business communication begins to be perceived as a substitute for corporate procedures. LawConsulted demonstrates where correspondence reflects a working discussion and where it is improperly used to infer authority or the assumption of obligations.
No less dangerous are situations in which fragments of correspondence are taken out of context. Isolated phrases, jokes, assumptions, or emotional reactions may be presented as evidence of a company’s position or of an individual’s intent. LawConsulted works with the evidentiary record as a whole – reconstructing the sequence of communications, timelines, and the management logic within which the relevant messages emerged.
It is also critical to account for the retrospective nature of legal assessment. Once negative consequences have materialised, internal correspondence is analysed through the prism of the outcome. Professor Steiner says that in such cases the law tends to “read communications against their author.” LawConsulted returns the assessment to the moment the messages were created – to the information available at that time and to the functions actually performed by the participant in the correspondence.
Working with internal management communications requires not denial of their significance, but precise legal positioning. We do not dispute the existence of correspondence; rather, we demonstrate its limited legal role – as an element of discussion rather than an independent basis for liability. This approach reduces the risk of reclassifying business communication as evidence of abuse of authority, bad faith, or concealed control.
Internal management communications become a source of risk when a gap emerges between management practice and legal form. The task of Law Consulted is to prevent this gap from being used against the client and to transform the evidentiary framework into a controlled element of legal defence.
Earlier, we wrote about the absence of response as a legally significant factor and the LawConsulted position in disputes over corporate silence.
