Daily Diary

Spiked: Square Mile's spurious mail throws a spammer in City works

Posted 5/04/2007 by The Daily Diary

Spiked: the Legal Week scoops that didn't quite make it

Square Mile's spurious mail throws a spammer in City works

City firms are set to crack down on staff who use abuse internal email systems following new research that suggests as much as 5% of email traffic between lawyers could be related to legal issues or law firm business.

Figures released this month by Legal Geek indicate that "dozens" of the many thousands of emails sent every day by lawyers at top City firms do not contain even a single reference to disputed dry-cleaning bills, oral sex techniques or farting.

The IT director of one magic circle firm said a "worrying culture of deeply professional conduct" had started to take hold in recent years, with lawyers now using their firms’ email systems to discuss clients' wishes and recent legislative changes.

He commented: "IT departments are constantly battling to filter out this sort of inappropriate rubbish, but even the most insidious monitoring system cannot catch all the ‘bad apples’. The occasional client briefing or document request is bound to slip through."

Experts believe little can be done to stem the flow of highly legal material, other than by moving fee earners into litigation departments so they have nothing work-related to talk about.

The news comes with one major national firm at the centre of a tabloid storm after it emerged that an amusingly sexist email conversation between two partners – about which female trainee had the shapeliest arse – had only been sent on to a handful of the partners' drinking buddies and not every major institutional client of the firm, as standard procedure would dictate.

One City partner said: "Yes, most of the emails I send are taking the piss out of clients, crude come-ons to married colleagues or forwarding doctored jpegs of the senior partner having sex with a goat. But if I want to share best practice or chase up a document once in a blue moon in I bloody well will, especially as it’s my own time I’m wasting."

The news comes with law firms being increasingly targeted by 'spammers' – online fraudsters who use firms' email addresses to bombard thousands of unsuspecting email users with offensive or meaningless material, often titled with eye-catching streams of random characters such as 'Wedlake Bell to hire trainee' or 'Leading global law firm DLA Piper opens new office in Siberia'.