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The employer's corporate resources were not used in the creation of the information in the email. The e-mail was only received by the employer.
I don't think the word "owner" or "ownership" is being used properly here, and is causing confusion. There's a difference between owning something and simply looking at it. "Ownership" of the financial information of course does not pass to the employer who receives it on his system. That would be like me e-mailing a copy of a patent to you. If I do that, you can of course read the patent, but you don't get any "ownership" of it.
At the end of the day, if the ex-employer found out that their financial info is now on a competitor's server, they likely could get it back, if they really wanted to. In disclosing the information in a confidential settlement discussion, they certainly did not consent to it being sent to a competitor's server, where the competitor could get to it. Of course, if the competitor has already seen it, the "cat's out of the bag," and an order telling them to delete it from the system probably doesn't do much.
This situation actually raises a lot of interesting, unique issues. Because it's not the employee's privacy rights being violated. That would be the normal situation (employee gets a private e-mail on the work system, and employer reads it). This situation adds an additional layer - the employee doesn't really care if the info is read by the employer, it is a *third party* (the ex-employer) who would have the complaint. And they are an "innocent" third party in that they only gave their info to the atty during confidential settlement communications, with the understanding it would not be disclosed to a third party. They didn't intentionally or negligently disclose the financial information to anyone, did everything right, yet now a competitor has the info. It seems like they should have a remedy for that.
So thinking about it a bit more, if the current employer reads and uses the info, I suppose an argument could be made that they did something wrong. Arguably, they know they are not supposed to be seeing it or using it - in other words, it is like an "inadvertent" disclosure to them. It could be argued that the e-mail was similar to an e-mail being inadverently sent to someone. So whatever the rules are for an unintended recipient of a e-mail may arguably apply to the new employer.
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