Personal Injury Law

Email flub causes a ruckus, and it should.

By Steve Lombardi

Electronic communications are easily sent to the wrong person. Information not intended for the recipient can be in advertently and unknowingly broadcasted. This subject is of critical importance to lawyers but it applies to many other professions. Journalists, judges, court personnel, governmental employees, private investigators, corporate communications and any other person communicating sensitive information to an intranet or Internet should be concerned and review how they transmit information. If you fit into any of these categories you wont' want to miss reading this discussion. So visit Steve Lombardi's blawg to find out how you're inadvertently publishing sensitive information.

I've previously posted about how LISTSERV's can be a disservice to clients. Carol Elefant writes well but on this subject I thought she missed the point of my post. We traded posts discussing the subject.

Following those posts I gave a speech about electronic communications and how the lawyer-client privilege can be inadvertently waived. Then on one of the LISTSERV's to which I belong a simple question by a young lawyer followed by a violation of the LISTSERV rules by someone who wasn't honest enough to admit their dishonesty clearly demonstrated why some LISTSERV's aren't worth belonging to. Seeing how powerless my own trial lawyer organization is to this obvious weakness in the format I resigned. Since then a report in the Wall Street Journal documented an email leak that caused a breach concerning the Zyprexa settlement between Eli Lilly and government prosecutors. That "leaked" information reportedly caused accusations to fly as to whether it was done intentionally to pressure Eli Lilly's settlement hand and then an honest lawyer that made a simple mistake admitted to what she had done. She and her firm should be congratulated for at least admitting the mistake because it clearly demonstrates a common pitfall of email address books.

Each of these examples points to how the lax use of electronic communications can be disastrous. One slip of the send button can lead to a huge headache that although unintended, can cost enormous sums of time and expense for all involved, not to mention the professional embarrassment.

I think it's worth revisiting this issue. I'll be posting on successive days about what this means to lawyers and their clients and how lawyers can protect themselves and their client's interests. So revisit tomorrow and we'll define the problem. I'd invite Carol to revisit this issue because she has so many young eyes reading her post they could benefit from a more thorough discussion of this subject. My post will run for several days due to the importance of the subject matter and its length.

Full post as published by Des Moines Personal Injury Lawyer on April 05, 2008 (boomark / email).