2 e-mailers get testy, and hundreds read every word
By Sacha Pfeiffer, Globe Staff | February 16, 2006
Once again, a friendly reminder: The next time you're tempted to send a nasty, exasperated, or snippy e-mail, pause, take a deep breath, and think again. Then consider the tale of local lawyers William A. Korman and Dianna L. Abdala.
Korman was miffed that Abdala notified him by e-mail this month that, after tentatively agreeing to work at his law firm, she changed her mind. Her reason:
''The pay you are offering would neither fulfill me nor support the lifestyle I am living."
In his e-mail reply, Korman told Abdala that her decision not to have told him in person ''smacks of immaturity and is quite unprofessional," and noted that in anticipation of her arrival, he had ordered stationery and business cards for her, reformatted a computer, and set up an e-mail account. Nevertheless, he wrote, ''I sincerely wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors."
Her curt retort: ''A real lawyer would have put the contract into writing and not exercised any such reliance until he did so."
His: ''Thank you for the refresher course on contracts. This is not a bar exam question. You need to realize that this is a very small legal community, especially the criminal defense bar.
Do you really want to start pissing off more experienced lawyers at this early stage of your career?"
Abdala's final three-word response:
''bla bla bla."
That's when the exchange, confirmed as authentic yesterday by Korman and Abdala, began whipping through cyberspace, landing in e-mail in-boxes around the city and country, and, eventually, across the Atlantic.
In short order, it has become yet another cautionary tale that you should definitely not put in an e-mail anything you wouldn't want the rest of the world to read.
Think former FEMA chief Michael Brown (''Can I quit now?"), indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff (''we need to get some $ from those monkeys!!!!"), and assorted Enron employees (''This week is not good. I have too large a pile of documents to shred").
''It almost sounds too obvious, but I'll say it: You should never write an e-mail that you are not willing to see preserved forever in history," said Boston Bar Association president-elect Jack Cinquegrana, who frequently handles cases that use e-mail as evidence. ''The dangers created by this new world we live in, where everything is recorded for history, are not only that you could be second-guessed at every stage in the context of a civil dispute or government investigation, but that your reputation can be affected by words you don't think you're preserving for posterity -- but really are."
The e-mail exchange between Korman, 36, a former Suffolk County prosecutor, and Abdala, 24, a 2004 graduate of Suffolk University Law School, has circulated so widely that each of them said they have received several hundred inquiries about it from as far away as Europe. Among the questions Korman has fielded are whether the back-and-forth is real (it is) and whether the job is still available (it is not). He received an e-mail from a young lawyer in Kansas apologizing on behalf of young lawyers nationwide.
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