24% of organizations have had employee e-mail subpoenaed, and 15% of companies have gone to court to battle lawsuits triggered by employee e-mail, according to The ePolicy Institute. 26% of employers have terminated employees for e-mail misuse. Another 2% have dismissed workers for inappropriate instant messenger (IM) chat. And nearly 2% have fired workers for offensive blog content, including posts on employees’ personal home-based blogs. 35% of employees use IM at work, only 31% of organizations have IM policy in place, and 13% retain IM business records. With 50% of workplace users downloading free IM tools from the Internet, the lack of written IM rules opens organizations to tremendous risk. Employees’ use of public IM tools coupled with ill-advised content including attachments (26%); jokes, gossip, rumors, and disparaging remarks (24%); confidential company, employee, and client information (12%); and sexual, romantic, and pornographic chat (10%) make workplace IM a recipe for legal, regulatory and security disaster.