You often see where someone wants something on “company letterhead”.
Is the content of correspondence on letterhead legally privileged in any way? If I write a letter to CenturyLink’s CEO, telling him to fuck himself or making some threat, does the fact that it’s on my business’s letterhead mean my business is partially liable as well?
Letterhead usually signifies that it is an official document or statement from the company in question. It is usually asked for simply to reduce the chances that you simply made up the documents yourself. I have usually heard it used asking for receipts for insurance reimbursement, or if you get a ticket for needing car repair, you need to go to court with the receipt on letter head.
Using it for slanderous purposes would depend on whether or not you were authorized to represent your company in that fashion. It would be possible for them to include your company from which you used the letterhead in a lawsuit, but your company could probably protect itself by firing and disavowing you. If you are an authorized spokesmen of your company, then the company may find itself in a bit more trouble. (I am sure you would still be fired though, even if it doesn’t protect the company.)
If it is YOUR company, as in, you own it, then absolutely, it would be liable. You just would be less likely to be fired. (But not much less likely to find yourself without a job.)
“Letterhead” is a joke in a huge company. We don’t have an “official” letterhead. Every department tends to make its own. We try to incorporate the company’s famous logo when we can, and that’s about it. If someone asks me for a note on company letterhead, I just create it with our logo.
Company letterhead indicates that it comes from that company. In the old days it was somewhat difficult to fake and scam artists would often put a decent amount of effort into securing or duplicating genuine letterhead, but today it’s generally just printed by a standard printer, and is pretty easy to copy even if it’s not.
Sending a message on your personal business’s letterhead indicates that your business is endorsing the message. If you’re the majority owner, sole owner, CEO, or otherwise in charge, then any fallout might come to the business, if it’s just a company you work for then whoever is in charge can simple fire you and say ‘that wasn’t approved,’ and let the heat come down on you.
Sending insults will mean that Centurylink will probably refrain from doing business with your company, and be otherwise ignored, sending threats will likely be reported to the police and charges will end up heading to you personally. If you said something legally actionable, then the company would almost certainly be sued too, but it’s not really likely that a crazy letter from a small company would result in anything more than ‘forward it to the local PD and let them handle the nutjob’.
As an in-house creative director, all I can do is cringe at this. Not on my watch! 
0.01549 grams.
Back in the day, company letterhead was on premium paper with an official company logo at the top, and from I recall, embossed on the paper. Only key people had access to official company letterhead.
Modern technology has really put an end to this form of communication, but it was big before faxes and emails.
In my limited experience, a letterhead is only an informal indicator to a recipient that the writer has at least the consent of the company that he claims to represent. For example, when I applied for media credentials for the World Series, MLB required that my request be on the letterhead of the media I proposed to represent. I was just a token gesture to filter out those with no legitimacy.
We keep letterhead paper in one of the trays of our Dept’s laser printer. Anyone can print with it by selecting that tray. The printer defaults to the tray with standard stock paper.
I’ve never been told there are any restrictions or liabilities to using letterhead.
A quick chat about this from your boss is merited.
If i received a letter from you on DopeCorp letterhead, telling me to go fuck myself, I’d be entitled to think that was the company’s policy and I’d express my concern in equal part at you and the senior management of DopeCorp.
Its likely at that point that you’d get your own letterhead note telling you to go fuck yourself from the CEO, Thaddeus Dope III, because you’re trashing his company’s reputation and good name.
Unless you happen to be the useless gadabout and wastrel, Thaddeus IV who will some day inherit everything.
I’d assume misusing letterhead or the company name in any negative way would get someone fired.
Maybe we should more closely restrict access to our company’s letterhead. Something to consider. Nearly all the staff in our Dept legitimately print on letterhead from time to time.
Letterhead’s being precious things to be carefully controlled might be a thing of the past in the west, but a similar custom is very much still alive in Asia (well at least in japan and Thailand where I have direct experience).
Every company must have a “company seal” (Hanko in Japanese) and it has to be stamped on any single piece of paper you have to send to the government or other companies, in addition to a signature. It’s silly since it would be pretty trivial to just obtain a sample and then get a matching seal made, but its a legal requirement. And yes sometimes I have to print out a document, stamp it, then scan it and email it to someone. Madness.
The company I work for has paper and envelopes with company letter head in the supply rooms along with the plain paper that people normally print documents on. At some juncture a company must trust its employees to actually do their work. And so things like letterhead document templates and access to email to the outside world is something generally afforded to basically every employee because to mediate this through several layers of staff would bring the company’s business to a halt.
Basically almost everybody understands that you shouldn’t use company letter head or templates to advance personal stuff. We get training videos every year that among other things tries to spell out more concretely the grey areas that come up. I imagine that abusing company letterhead for personal non business use would get you fired, but I have never heard of that happening.
In the UK at least, company letterheads must carry the official registered office and company number, as well as whatever office address the letter is coming from, it’s more than just a logo at the top.
A piece of paper with a company logo slapped on it isn’t an official company letterhead.
Maybe the boss has considered this and decided the chances are so low as to not merit inconvenient limits on printing on letterhead.
There are situations where Spanish documents have a similar requirement, but we can use an electronic stamp. There are two levels: official “e-documents” with a bunch of embedded information, used for example for e-invoices, and adding a gif of a stamp or signature where one would be, then sending it as a new pdf. The end result looks just as if you’d printed and scanned, but without “killing any plants”.
Back last century, I used to work for a company that shipped good to Cuba. They had precise rules about invoices that if not followed would result in the good being stranded in the docks.
We shipped machines and associated spare parts and the shipping documents/invoices often ran to 10 pages. All had to be typed in Spanish with no corrections allowed. They were printed on special (expensive) paper that we purchased from the Chamber of Commerce.
At one time, insurance certificates had to be ‘originals’; copies were not acceptable. As a fleet manager, I would have 200 plus ‘original’ copies for all the fleet cars. These days insurance companies expect us to print our own certificates if we want one.
Or possibly the boss just trusts his employees recommendations on self-fuckery recommendations.
I will often ask people seeking limited driving privileges in our court to bring a letter from their boss, on business letterhead, confirming that they work there and specifying their typical work hours. Could someone steal letterhead or generate it on their home computer? Sure. It’s just a minor precaution to make sure what you’re being told is true, and to have something in writing that can be added to the court file and/or shown to police if the person is stopped.
I work in a “huge company” (~5000 employees, locations in >50 countries) and we have strict standards on templates from everything ranging from Letterhead, logo usage, and even PowerPoint.
Hope that makes SpeedwayRyan feel a bit better.