Anthony Painter

Guest post by Stephen Adshead
When I turned on my computer this morning, I found that I had changed into a half-wit.

My male, anthropologically pre-programmed brain, struggling to focus on the single mammoth hunt, was overloaded with the unsolicited, reply all, 95MB video clip, thought piece, would anyone like a new pen tray?, birthday cake notification, your mailbox is over its limit, urgent – register now – new course (I thought I already had), charitable donation to Haiti, work emails. Momentarily gratified that I could at least ‘action’ (or rather, delete) those emails quickly, then frustrated by the asymmetry of one person able to interrupt thousands, and finally embittered by the constant bombardment and lost productivity, I took my note pad and venti mocha elsewhere. But the red light of the blackberry flashed away, teasing me to sort, to deflect or ‘high-level’ the urgent, when what I wanted to do was reflect and opine on the significant.

Why am I so angered by birthday treat emails and pictures of a colleague’s newborn (3MB) that I feel like the frog slowly being boiled alive? Have I turned into a workplace moron incapable of joy? In my defence, it might be the 100 or so emails I receive each day (apparently average) and the Sisyphean task of keeping on top of them; however I suspect it is also the confusing ubiquity of emails. To sift and prioritise the critically important emails, I have first to wade through everything else.

Group emails have become part of the fabric – the surfaces and the joins – of the workplace. The problem, as Marshall McLuhan predicted many years ago, is that the medium has become the message. Whilst it is important to share information, eat cake with colleagues and discuss children, the nature of email has embedded itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the nature of email influences how the message is perceived. I receive advice from external lawyers by email, but when the multi-tasking pressure becomes too much, it is also a medium I have read whilst peeing. Pictures of newborns should be put up and cooed over in a nice environment, not mass deleted as spam. The efficiency and ubiquity of email has downgraded its importance and created false camaraderies; what we need to do is talk.

A desire to communicate in any fashion, and be heard amongst the din, has created an industry in facebook and twitter, and thoughts – good or otherwise, fleeting or entrenched – are recorded and distributed for posterity; a fact that has had the knock-on effect of making the job of claimant lawyers significantly easier.

Fabrice Tourre, self-styled Fabulous Fab, the trader at the centre of the SEC’s fraud investigation into investment bank Goldman Sachs sent a series of emails from his work account that resemble facebook status updates:

23 January 2007 – “…More and more leverage in the system, the entire system is about to crumble any moment…the only potential survivor the fabulous Fab (as Mitch would kindly call me, even though there is nothing fabulous abt me…) standing in the middle of all these complex, highly levered, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of those monstruosities !!!”

29 January 2007 – “When I think that I had some input into the creation of this product (which by the way is a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: “Well, what if we created a “thing”, which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?”) it sickens the heart to see it shot down in mid-flight…It’s a little like Frankenstein turning against his own inventor ; )”

7 March 2007 – “… I will give you more details in person on what we spoke about but the summary of the US subprime business situation is that it is not too brilliant…According to Sparks [Daniel Sparks, a former head of the mortgages department at Goldman], that business is totally dead, and the poor little subprime borrowers will not last so long!!!…I do not intend to wait for the complete explosion of the industry and the beginning of distressed trading, I think there might be more interesting things to do in Europe…”

13 June 2007 – “Just made it to the country of your favorite clients [Belgians]!!! I’m managed to sell a few abacus bonds [Abacus was one of Goldman Sachs's Collateralised Debt Obligations, tied to the performance of sub-prime mortgage-backed securities] to widows and orphans that I ran into at the airport…”

Lawyers faced with the overwhelming task of sifting through millions of documents are increasingly looking for emails like this. Unless present work habits change, and those of the next twitter generation about to join us, there will be many more of them. I advise people that if you would not write in that manner in a letter, don’t put it in an email (or indeed other electronic messages that could be discloseable in a litigation or regulatory context). But with one email account used for work and personal use, the existence of corporate facebook and twitter pages, and what was once said now being texted, this makes following that advice, all the time, far from straightforward.

One creative solution to inappropriate emailing is Mail Goggles – a feature that sets maths problems for you to solve before you may send drunken emails late on a Friday or Saturday – however, I strongly suspect it would be unpopular as a complete corporate solution. Emails with a shelf-life and automated deletion after a period of time, or making group emails permissible only on Friday afternoons, are appealing ideas, but the devil will be in the detail; senders of emails typically attach greater importance and urgency to their emails, than others’. You could try and encourage people to think of group emails as a mass distribution of letters – if it is not suitable for several thousand bits of paper, it might not be suitable for several thousand emails. Again, this feels like tinkering round the edges, fiddling whilst Rome burns. In the meantime, some people have developed their own coping strategies, including deleting entire inboxes or that day’s unread emails, or preventing the receipt of cc’d messages, in the hope that if it is urgent he or she will phone. Wider and better solutions, both to reduce the volume of emails and encourage healthier communication, need to be found urgently.

I, for one, would prefer for my work email to be devoted solely to client-related work. I think that we should find other ways to communicate exciting client wins, charitable gifts and the availability of nibbles, and as many as possible should be in person.

This blog will automatically self-destruct after 7 days.

Stephen Adshead is a litigator-turned-risk manager-turned-blogger.