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Critical Messages Blocked

Firms’ spam filters thwart legitimate e-mails.

By Bonnie Cha

Bonnie Cha is a journalist based in San Francisco and former associate editor of Law Office Computing.

For attorney Jeffrey J. Stesiak, one of the most nightmarish things that could happen to a trial lawyer happened to him — he missed a court appearance date that he had no idea existed. Stesiak, an attorney at Sweeney, Pfeifer, Morgan & Stesiak in South Bend, Ind., was representing the family of Ruthie Barns in a wrongful-death lawsuit when he failed to appear at a status conference on Dec. 8, 2004. In fact, he had left for a vacation in California the day before. This was not due to carelessness on his part or human error at all. So, what was the culprit? Technology. Unbeknownst to Stesiak, his law firm’s spam-blocking software set the Internet security level to high, thus preventing the court’s e-mail notification from arriving in his Inbox. Fortunately for Stesiak and his client, U.S. Magistrate Judge Christopher A. Nuechterlein decided not to sanction the parties for failing to appear in court and avoided a situation where the case could have been dismissed.

While Stesiak was lucky this time around, his situation brings up a larger question: How often is this happening at law firms nationwide? In a day and age where e-mail Inboxes are bombarded by spam, some with crippling viruses, spam filters are a necessity. However, simply installing spam-blocking software isn’t the solution. “I have run into very few law firms that have given much thought to their anti-spam needs,” said Ray Everett-Church, principal at PrivacyClue, a privacy consultancy based in San Jose, Calif. “They tend to leave the issue up to their Information Technology departments, who — depending largely on budget — sample from the variety of solutions out there, mostly relying on the marketing hype of various turnkey solutions. Unfortunately, many of those solutions are very ham-handed filters that wind up with huge false positive rates, dropping legitimate mail and often letting a lot of spam go through.”

To put it in perspective, Timothy J. Walton, a partner at Walton & Roess who specializes in Internet law and has worked on spam litigation, explained it this way,“If each recipient gets 50 messages a day, and half of that amount is spam, a 99 percent effective filter will delete seven nonspam messages every month,” Walton said. “If a firm is losing 70 nonspam e-mails every month, not only will some of them likely be critical, but others will result in employee time spent with clients or counsel who say ‘Why didn’t you get my e-mail?’ Scale it for a firm of 100 employees instead of 10, and we are talking about a lot of lost messages.”

So how can attorneys maintain their e-mail through spam filters without running into problems such as Stesiak’s? One solution Walton suggested is whitelisting, which allows messages to be delivered to a recipient’s mailbox from trusted senders. Whitelisted messages can include those from every e-mail address in an attorney’s contact database (personal and professional) and also those e-mails the attorney has accepted and moved to a folder. Walton also advised that firms employ acceptable-use e-mail policies to help reduce employees’ personal use of e-mail, thereby potentially decreasing the exposure of the address to spammers.

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