I’ve seen a number of news items over the past few years in which internal firm or law school emails get leaked to online legal gossip sites, to the embarrassment of the originating institution. In my view, the frequency with which this occurs indicates a world in transition. Once, there were no online gossip sites worth worrying about, and firm memoranda about salaries, scandals, employment issues, or stolen lunches from the office refrigerator rarely made it past the walls of the institution. Now, there are such sites, and salacious and even mundane internal correspondence regularly leaks to them. This strikes me as a situation that can’t persist in its current form much longer. Either practices will change (i.e., no more emails about firm policies) or some sort of restrictions will be put in place. (A third option, that expectations of confidentiality concerning such matters will evaporate, strikes me as unlikely.)

The latest item to set off this thought in my head was this news item from the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog (essentially a slightly more tony version of Above the Law). As I tell my Internet Law students, there are various ways of controlling a behavior such as forwarding emails. Law is one way, but not a likely one in this case. Informal social norms are another (“Give a hoot! Don’t redistribute!”). That seems unlikely here, too. But a third is some sort of technological solution. And here, I would think a technological solution is at least conceivable: an office network that offers, as an option, blocking redistribution of the content of certain emails.

Assuming employees or students determined to spread gossip, of course, complete security would be impossible. At the very least, those reading the email could paraphrase it from memory. But complete security wouldn’t be necessary to achieve the goal here, which would be to at least stem the flow of such documents in their entirety, which makes it difficult to deny them. Merely blocking forwarding of the email would likely be easily circumvented, however, through use of cut-and-paste. Even blocking cut-and-paste and screenshots would not prevent retyping the entire email or writing it out by hand. Once we get to that level, however, the inconvenience factor has gone up tremendously, possibly enough to deter people from forwarding mildly embarrassing emails like the Michigan career adviser’s.