A law firm decided to notify everyone that it was moving by e-mail. Normally this is an everyday occurrence, unless the sender decides to create a distribution list with a few hundred of its closes friends putting the distribution list in the ‘cc’ e-mail address line and not the ‘bbc’ e-mail address line. Other than the fact that the law firm may be disclosing client information, an ethics violation, it is certainly not a way to make or keep friends.
Once a few recipients decided to ‘reply’ to the distribution list and then a few others decided to hit ‘reply’ to get themselves off of the distribution list it was off and running. You can imagine the fun when you come back from lunch to see a few hundred e-mails with a subject line that ‘XYZ Law Firm is moving’ from e-mail addresses and people that you have never seen before. But wait the fun was just beginning.
In an attempt to get themselves removed from the ‘list’ by hitting reply each succeeding e-mail generated more e-mails. Some of the folks took it in stride, some decided to turn the whole episode into Facebook Instant Messenger. It is always nice to find out that people you do not know are eating lunch at Taco Bell… Others threaten legal action if they are not taken off the list, like that helped. One even posted an e-mail that was too obscene to reprint. Worse was a past client that was not happy about the firm taking a case, letting the statute of limitations run and then dropping the case.
After a couple of hours it has finally come to an end when XWY Law Firm got Microsoft involved to shut the chain e-mail down. Thank you Microsoft.
On the plus side, was not sure what I was going to blog about today. Thank you XWZ Law Firm.