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The $1 Billion E-Mail Auto-Complete Disaster: TOLD ‘YA SO!
For years and years, I’ve been railing at my CLE audiences during my “How NOT to Commit Malpractice With Your Computers” session about the dangers of the seemingly innocuous auto-complete function built into all email systems. We’ve all had embarrassing incidents of mis-directing email because we typed a couple of letters into the “To” field when addressing an email, saw auto-complete present what looked like the intended addressee, clicked and sent and then an “ohnosecond” later, realized our error. Most of the time, just a little “oops, my bad.”
But in a New York Times article, commented on by the ABA Journal, it was more than just a little “oops.” It was a very, very big “OOPS.” A billion dollar OOPs, to be precise. In the article by Debra Cassens Weiss entitled, “Did Lawyer’s E-Mail Goof Land $1B Settlement on NYT’s Front Page?” an outside lawyer for Eli Lilly & Co. apparently had two people named “Berenson†in her e-mail address book. As Weiss noted, one was a reporter for the New York Times and the other was her co-counsel assisting in confidential negotiations on a possible $1 billion settlement between the pharmaceutical company and the government. Both recipients were named “Berenson” – unfortunately, the “wrong” Bersenson’s name (the NYT reporter) came alphabetically before the “right” Berenson (her co-counsel). Thanks to auto-complete and not “thinking or looking before clicking” – off the message went to the wrong recipient. A one-click road to malpractice?? A billion dollar auto-complete mistake? What do you think?
The question is whether her e-mail to the wrong Berenson spurred last week’s front-page New York Times story revealing talks to resolve criminal and civil investigations into the company’s marketing of the anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa, as Portfolio.com reports. While subsequent reports indicated it may not have been the mis-addressed email that brought the issue to a head, it still underscores the extreme danger of using auto-complete capabilities in email when our brains may not be firing on all 8 cylinders.
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Although I thought I was pretty careful in this regard, I did this once a couple of months ago when I sent the ABA related email to the same named music friend…..the music friend and I had a good laugh! (Although the goof was caught by someone in ABA leadership – my face was red!) The other way around, if it had been confidential firm information and not just related to a program I’m chairing, well, it taught me to be extra careful (this was before this front-page story), particularly given a lot of my music friends happen to be lawyers too! And, fortunately or unfortunately, I don’t have NYT reporters auto-saved in my email. It did teach me to be extra careful, a good lesson to be learned before it’s costly or a malpractice issue.
Comment by Randi Whitehead — March 6, 2008 @ 8:55 am