After lawyer has public meltdown, is he entitled to privacy?
A Redskins legal victory will cause one attorney to get punted
Over at Above The Law, we have been writing about a young promising attorney whose career is currently imploding due to a series of funny, idealistic, and ill-advised e-mails with high-level partners at his firm.
The short version of the story: Corporate law firm Quinn Emanuel celebrated a victory last week in its representation of football’s Washington Redskins. A judge ruled that the team’s name can’t be challenged by Native Americans offended by the term “redskin.” Robert Raskopf, the Quinn partner who had been on the case for 17 years, sent out a triumphal e-mail on Friday to all the attorneys in the firm.
But not everyone at the firm wanted to join in the pow wow victory dance. A young Ivy-League educated attorney, in his first year at the firm, decided to hit “Reply All” to tell the partner, and everyone else at the firm, about his dissatisfaction with the win. He wrote quite a lengthy e-mail, including the following:
i feel compelled to the point i’m willing to write (and i’m from iowa so imposition is a slow, agonizing death) with a request that we might take a moment (water fountain break, going to nelly and claire’s shop downstairs, getting printouts) to think about how many people (native americans, americans, non-native americans, non-american natives) are bummed today because a mascot they find offensive remains on the second column of the sports page and on a kid’s hat and on espn’s score ticker (and, to a lesser extent, on cnn headline sport’s score ticker).
As you might imagine, big corporate law firms are hierarchical places, and things like first year associates challenging senior partners are just not done. But it gets worse.
A second partner responded to the legal upstart, notably NOT using Reply All, upbraiding him for his insolence:
We have not met. I am in the NY office. I sit down the hall from Bob. Calling Bob out in front of the entire firm is a poor use of the “reply to all” function. Note the lack of any parentheses in this email. It makes it much easier to read.
Bob and I represent clients, not causes. We like Native Americans. If Native Americans had hired Bob, the Redskins would have lost the case. But they didn’t. They hired someone else. So it was incumbent on Bob to kick their ass in court. It is really that simple.
But I digress. The real purpose of this email was to suggest that you made a mistake by sending your email to every lawyer in the firm, thus ensuring that every time someone says your name, they will think “isn’t he the first year that shit all over Raskopf’s victory email?”
The first-year associate then chose to forward this private correspondence with the partner to the entire firm again. It was quite a lengthy e-mail. Here’s an excerpt:
The First Year Associate Who Shat All Over Raskopf’s Victory Email
OR
The First Year Associate Who Repurposed the RedskinsBy: FIRST YEAR ASSOCIATE
friends:
hey. sorry to write to you again. i’m surely wearing out my welcome. eek!
anywho, i think i finally realized that quinn emanuel is indeed not:
1. a dating service
2. a family
3. a commune (although i do get to have flowers on my office wall)i get it. we’re a business. specifically, we’re a law firm. as such, our charge, at its most basic, is to make money (that’s the business part) while doing the lawyer thing (that’s the law firm part). i think i denied that reality, but i’ve accepted it.
He ended his e-mail to the 400-attorney firm by saying ” i see no reason for us to go posting/forwarding this email to all corners of the internet.” But with an e-mail like that in 400 sets of hands, it will likely reach at least one corner of the Internet. It wound up in our inbox at Above The Law, and we posted it yesterday. It immediately went viral, with 40,000 page views the last time I checked and the Google Analytics counter still clicking.
At Above The Law, we regard partners as public figures and included the name of the Redskins victor. But we have done our best to conceal the identity of the young associate.
It has not been easy. Commenters keep trying to out him in the comments, meaning that we have to sweep through and moderate. I don’t quite understand the impulse to reveal his identity, but it is a strong one. I feel like the guy is entitled to some privacy for the sake of his future job prospects as he’s not likely to be at Quinn Emanuel for much longer.
But did he give up his privacy by sending an e-mail to all the attorneys at his firm? Obviously, all 400 people on that e-mail chain know who he is, by his design. Once the e-mail makes the leap outside of the firm, does he still have a reasonable expectation of privacy?
A.k.a., do my co-editors and I have to keep monitoring the 800+ comments on that post to make sure his name does not appear?
While I would love to get a resounding no in answer to that question, our policy at Above The Law is to try to maintain the privacy of non-public figures. (Until their identity comes out elsewhere.) But here at the Not-So Private Parts, I wonder if we’re fighting a losing battle. In the digital age, sending an e-mail to 400 people, even if it’s internal communication, probably eradicates your right to privacy. Plus, this particular person chose to send private correspondence with a partner out to the entire firm, so he kind of undermined his argument about keeping internal, private correspondence private.
What do you think?
I think it’s a good idea to use the phone more often. It may be wiretapped (thanks, Patriot Act!), but at least there’s no easy “Forward” option on that.
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This is the best e-maelstrom I’ve read in awhile. (Also, I’ve been waiting to use the the word e-maelstrom in public. Lame, yes.)
I have a sort of admiration for the First Year, though I wonder if he’s having some kind of Michael Clayton-esque manic episode. That kind of insubordination would not go over well at any company…But the fact he doesn’t seem to give a damn is pretty funny.
As for privacy, I can’t see how there’s any expectation in this case. If you all don’t want to release his name, that’s cool, but I don’t think there’s any moral/ethical issue here.
In general, one shouldn’t assume any kind of privacy at all with email. My feeling is that anything one puts in email they should be prepared to read on the front page of the NYT the next day. That’s hyperbolic, a rule we all break, but also a good way to look at the “dangers” of the medium.
As an aside, to quote a colleague: “Make love by email, make war by phone.”
I respectfully disagree with Hastings’ comment. This was an email sent by a lawyer to other lawyers and staff within his firm. While there were no client confidences revealed in his email it is generally understood that it is bad form to share with the outside world the internal communications of a law firm and worse than bad form to attribute by name the author(s) of those communications (or the internal communications of professional staff, at the very minimum). What appears to be a clear and unmitigated failure to understand the hierarchy at Quinn (or a brazen decision to ignore it) aside, I don’t think that sharing his name with the outside world adds anything to the story and might have the added and unwanted effect of chilling the distribution of these emails that we all find so entertaining. Publishing them on ATL is one thing, but giving up the poor (and clueless) kid’s name is simply not necessary.
Now, on a serious note, what’s the kid’s name?
[...] P.S. As we said yesterday, “Please don’t disclose identities in the comments or we will ban you from the wagon.” We’ve really thought about this, a lot. [...]
Although I sincerely agree with the kid’s sentiments, sound judgment is part of being a good lawyer, and this kid most decidedly does not have sound judgment.
Whether you release his/her name or not isn’t going to have much of an impact on his/her career trajectory – the lawyer community is like a small town. The chances that a prospective employer will not know about this are slim indeed.
Sort of eerily fascinating that someone can survive law school, get hired at a major firm and still have no clue about basic office etiquette. It’s pretty normal to feel passionately about an issue that arises at work but common sense, (or the simple desire to remain employed for a while longer) usually ensures those feelings aren’t committed to publicly shared media.