Things have been rather busy for me over the last couple of weeks, hence the lack of posts. Kenneth Gartner is helping out with this post about one of the latest corporate email faux pas. Thanks Ken!

Here is another headline story about email mislabeling that resulted in significant embarrassment and business impact, colorfully reported by the NYT as “A Nightmare on Email Street”. A lawyer for Eli Lilly mistakenly emailed an extremely sensitive, unflatteringly frank missive about the company’s negotiations with the federal government over a case of “marketing improprieties” for one of their popular pharmaceuticals. Instead of mailing it to another lawyer involved in the case, the TO field auto-completion helpfully found a similarly named person who happened to be a NYT reporter!

This is yet another astounding example of sender remorse – a mistake that could have been averted with 10 seconds of due diligence before committing the message to be sent. As with many aspects of electronic communication these days, those extra 10 seconds can seem perfunctory and wasteful — we have spelling checkers, auto-completion, address books and other safety nets at our disposal. For a medium like email, one will rarely receive acclaim for maintaining a staccato pace for email communication, but one will surely earn unwelcome infamy for the failure to double check even one time.

Being able to set up email policy to enforce a simple “Are you sure?” check is one way to deal with such unwanted revelations. In this case, a variation on an ‘Ethical Firewall‘, also referred to as a ‘Chinese Wall‘, would have been appropriate — all communications involving this client’s case could have had a list of recipients and SMTP domains that are appropriate and if any others were present on the TO, CC or BCC lines then an interactive dialog could be raised asking the sender if the mail should be delivered as addressed or not. Problem solved.

It may seem like a lot of work to identify and maintain a list of responsible parties for an ethical firewall, but the pain versus the gain is hardly comparable in cases of this magnitude. In fact, this is a poster child for the philosophy of “security in depth” — the whole law office should have also had an overarching “ethical firewall” policy to prevent email from being disseminated to media companies except through selected individuals. Having multiple communication checkpoints running in real-time, communicating directly with the sender (or perhaps a compliance officer or public relations handler) is just part of smart business practice these days. It should not take a catastrophe to realize it is much better to be safe than sorry with respect to electronic communication.

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