Private email discovery is a very much “it depends” situation. Specifically the legal context.

For example, in NJ Board of Ed members are elected officials. If they conduct board business in their personal phones or other devices or accounts, they are discoverable.

However, a judge ruled that, to protect their privacy, if this arises then Open Public Records Act (or State version of FOIA) request search on private phones can only be done by the phone’s owner, not the OPRA administrator.

So suddenly you have to trust individual board members to actually search their phones properly and not just lie.

In my case a board member was in this situation and just said “I deleted those texts”.

Which maybe is a technical violation of OPRA, but the penalties are a slap on the wrist here in NJ.