It’s every lawyer’s nightmare; you compose an e-mail laying out the strengths and weaknesses of your client’s position and shoot it off to other members of the team. Ten minutes later you get a reply from your client asking why a strange name appears on the cc list. Yikes, time for damage control.
The autofill feature of e-mail systems makes it easy to make mistakes; type a few letters of a person’s name or e-mail address and the system fills in the rest. As new names get added to the address book, unexpected consequences can follow; typing “Ro” in the recipient field might originally have caused Ronald Feldman’s e-mail address to be used, but adding Roberta Jones to the address book can cause that e-mail address to be used instead, even though she might be opposing counsel, a prospective employer, or a contact at the local newspaper.
