Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Because she is a woman.

Somewhat tangential, but:

What kind of idiot puts that sort of thing in writing? People at work don’t always like each other and sometimes talk smack about each other, but leaving a trail is a whole different thing.

Lawyers get to read some interesting stuff that gets produced in discovery, so I could tell you some stories. Except that I can’t.

Emails aren’t quite the gold mine that they were back in the 1990s and 2000s, when people would routinely write things that they would never dare put in an interoffice memo. A lot of that talk has moved to texts and messaging apps, as in this story.

Anyway, there’s a recent story that I have no involvement in that is a classic case of “what were these people thinking” by people who really, really, really should have known better. One part of the story is here, but I’ll try to summarize:

A couple of partners at a major Los Angeles firm — including one who headed its employment practice, i.e. a guy who spends his life advising and defending companies accused of discrimination and harassment and knows exactly how damaging stupid emails can be — for years made racist, sexist, and homophobic comments in their work emails to each other.

Of course, the immorality and stupidity isn’t confined to the two emailers. The reason this story came to light was because the two lawyers left the firm and started up a rival practice, taking many of the first firm’s attorneys (and, presumably, clients) with them. Original firm is of course pissed off at this, as they always are, and so elects to torch the departing attorneys’ reputations by releasing these emails. This does in fact succeed in sabotaging the infant splinter firm, but people began to ask the obvious questions like “wait, how long have you known about these assholes, and you only (pretended to) care when they LEFT your firm?” Original firm has since been dumped by multiple clients, and is being sued by several former employees for discrimination.