Think Before You Hit "Send"
A (unintentionally) humorous cease and desist letter from a Portland law firm once again illustrates the importance of reviewing what you are sending.
The case involves the Internet site Black Friday, found at www.bfads.net. As you are no doubt aware, Black Friday refers to the day after Thanksgiving, when many retailers come out with ads touting amazing bargains to kick off the start of Christmas shopping. For a few years the Black Friday site has managed to get advanced copies of many of the ads, and has published them on the site so that visitors can pre-plan their shopping excursions.
I personally feel that the Black Friday site offers a real public service, and I can’t imagine why some of the retailers get so upset by this advance look at their ads. If the point is to draw people into your store and make sales, why be upset about some additional advertising? (Unless you are concerned that some other retailer might see the ad and respond with a lower price, but wouldn't that only help consumers -- a goal I'm sure all retailers support?) Indeed, it is my understanding that some retailers have gotten into the spirit of it all, and provide advance copies of their ads to bfads.net. Others, however, feel compelled to make intellectual property arguments and every year bfads.net is hit with a number of cease and desist letters, which the website sometimes posts as badges of honor.
The ad in question this time was the OfficeMax ad. Bfads.net got a hold of an early draft, and published it with a disclaimer that it might not be the final ad since it was riddled with typos and misspellings. OfficeMax responded by having its attorney fire off a cease and desist letter, demanding that the information be removed from the cite by 11:00 a.m. the following day. (Customarily in cease and desist letters the deadline is set at noon or by close of business, but I guess this attorney wanted to make the demand sound really urgent by moving it up to 11:00 a.m.)
Now comes the humorous part. In order to identify the specific ad to which she was referring, the attorney attached a screen shot to her email. No doubt she used some program that allows a screen capture, but what she failed to realize was that the program captured the entire screen, which showed the Windows task bar and all the other programs she was using. One of those programs was Spider Solitaire. So now all of the attorney’s partners know she plays Solitaire at her desk, and in addition to posting her cease and desist letter, bfads.net got the extra satisfaction of referring to the "Spider Solitaire playing law firm" that is trying to shut it down. In the grand scheme of things, not the worst thing that could happen to a law firm, but probably not the image it would prefer to transmit to clients.
Lesson for all businesses: Check your email attachments and watch the Word metadata. Whenever I drag and drop an attachment into an email, I open it again to make sure it is the correct document. It’s an additional step and 99% of the time proves to be unnecessary, but the couple of times I have caught a mistake has made the effort worthwhile. As to Word documents, unless you are anticipating that the recipient is going to make revisions to the document, send it as a PDF file, not as a Word file. I am amazed by all the resumés I receive in Word format. When I open the file, there are all the misspellings and unrecognized words underlined in red. And while the version sent to me professes the applicant's life long desire to work in the legal field, the prior versions of the document state his lifelong desires to work in advertising, work in retail and to work on a crab boat.
Update: Ironically, the day after I wrote the above comments, I received an email from a very large company that my law firm does not represent, consisting of a string of emails relating to the company’s internal investigation of a dispute with a customer. I skimmed the email, surmising that the company had sent it for my review in anticipation of a lawsuit, but gave up because it never posited any question or sought advice. A few minutes later the sender called and sheepishly asked if I would please delete his email. He had inadvertently sent this internal document to the wrong Aaron.
Again, think before you hit send.
http://www.businesslawalert.com/admin/trackback/163182
PROTIP:
Pressing ALT + PRINT SCREEN will capture only the active window and will not capture desktop, once done simply paste it into a document.
Cheers!
Um...I don't know: "the pot calling the kettle black" or "People who live in glass houses...?" I guess not only should we "Think Before we Hit Send," perhaps an author (as well as an attorney) should proofread an on-line article before publishing. I could be wrong, but I don't think "posited" (see third from last line in Update paragraph) is a word. Perhaps Aaron meant "posed."
Yes, Billy, you are wrong.
POSIT pos-it-ed, pos-it-ing, pos-its
1. To assume the existence of; postulate.
2. To put forward, as for consideration or study; suggest: "If a book is hard going, it ought to be good. If it posits a complex moral situation, it ought to be even better".
3. To place firmly in position.
But thanks for reading, and I'll happily accept your proofreading, just be sure to check the dictionary!