Bryan Cronin's Real Estate Blog

NYTIMES.COM, February 17, 2011

BE careful when clicking “send.” That is essentially the message to brokers and their clients from a state court, which ruled recently in a real estate dispute that e-mails can carry the same weight as traditional ink-on-paper contracts.

“Given the vast growth in the last decade and a half in the number of people and entities regularly using e-mail,” handwriting and e-mail should now basically be considered one and the same, according to the decision in Naldi v. Grunberg, which was handed down on Oct. 5 by the Appellate Division, First Department of State Supreme Court in Manhattan. The ruling, which attracted little public notice when it was announced, was appealed on Monday to the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court.

“As much as communication originally written or typed on paper, an e-mail retrievable from computer storage” is proof of a deal, according to the court’s opinion, which was written by Associate Justice David Friedman.

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