Hi Pippin
I'm sorry to hear about your retrenchment.
The answer to your question will depend very much on the wording in your contract of employment. Do you have a copy of this?
Generally, an employment contract will have a clause that deals with intellectual property and will set out information around ownership and assignment of intellectual property. Commonly, employers will write clauses into employment contracts to the effect that any 'intellectual property' created by you in the 'course of your employment' with the employer will become the property of the employer. So the first step would be to find this clause and do the following:
- Look at what is included in their definition of 'intellectual property' (does it refer to email? and if so, does it only refer to email from a company web address? and only work created on a work computer?).
- Look at the wording around the situations in which this intellectual property is to be transferred (eg, does it state it relates to property created in 'course of employment' or something more specific? This is important as it will help guide whether emails in your personal time but related to work can be captured).
Looking at it from a strictly legal perspective, it could then be arguable that if you used your personal email account for work matters or to make contact with clients or colleagues that this forms part of the intellectual property that belongs to the company. Do you know why/how they are aware that you may have work emails on your private account?
However, from a practical perspective I would not be complying with their demands without more specific instructions from them as to the basis on which they are demanding them. You could write back something quite vague in an attempt to resolve it such as "all relevant work emails are contained on my work computer and in my work emails."
Separately, if you are based in Australia and are concerned about them trying to get out of their rights in terms of paying out your redundancy:
There are very strict procedures that your employer needs to follow in order to terminate an employee on the basis of a breach of contractual obligations. Given you have already been retrenched, I don't see how your employee could then do a complete flip and try to claim you were being terminated a result of breach of contract as this would mean the redundancy they had given you was not a genuine redundancy.
Can you please give more information as to why you think they might be trying to do this?