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Infamous Emails Don't Always Kill Careers
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Those oft-forwarded email gaffes don't always lead to career meltdowns for the ashamed senders, Jared Sandberg writes in the Wall Street Journal. In some corners of the business world, preserving a reputation can be less important than acquiring one in the first place. For instance, the 2003 legal summer associate who accidentally emailed 40 colleagues to announce he was 'busy doing jack' ended up getting a job at the firm. More recently, the young woman who told off a lawyer offering her a job -- and saw her email forwarded worldwide -- is quite confident that the notoriety can't hurt, and might even help, her career."
This should be marked as either Funny or Insightful; I found it to be both. The mod that marked it Offtopic is an obvious example of Mods on Crack!
TFA doesn't mention it, but other media reports have stated that the employer tried to cut Abdala's starting salary *after* she had accepted the job offer.
See, for example, http://www.masslaw.com/break021506.cfm
And so far no one has said that forwarding a private e-mail exchange doesn't reflect well on a CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY -- a person who is expected to exercise great discretion with other people's private communications.
Abdala arguably committed gross errors of form, but IMO everyone overlooks the substantial errors of substance that were made by other parties.
note: not for the faint of heart, or those of us with morals (there must be somebody out there)
Tucker Max
We had a movie lunch at mylast job once. Until it was ended after the organizer was "spoken to" for bringing an inappropriate movie. The movie- Ferris Beuller's Day Off.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
From another article on the topic, the hiring firm had decided after the verbal agreement to lower the pay. If anyone would be liable for breach of contract, it would be the hiring firm. And then he would be seriously in violation of breach of confidentiality by doing this... if I knew of a lawyer that did this I would do everything in my power to never hire him. And I don't believe that responding "Bla bla bla" is really that bad as the extremely unprofessional threat the lawyer made: "You need to realize that this is a very small legal community, especially the criminal defense bar. Do you really want to start pissing off more experienced lawyers at this early stage of your career?". To me this sounds like a very thinly veiled threat that he is going to try to get her disbarred for 1)not accepting the job after he had changed the terms of the contract by lowering her pay and then 2)making a rebuttal to his statement that her actions were unprofessional.
Now, maybe she should have thought a little bit more carefully in dealing with this creep, but you think a seasoned lawyer would be the one showing some modicum of professionalism. Instead, he acted like a whiny little brat, used semi-vulgar language, made threats and then forwarded a conversation on to others that may have had a small expectancy of privacy.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Law school is 3 years usually (though people who work while in school often are in a 4 year program). If the school permits it, you could take summer classes and get down to 2 1/2 years. I'm sure that with some work (summer classes, AP classes in high school) one could graduate from college in 3 years or so as well.
So it's not really that big an accomlishment. She's at about the bottom of the age range for new lawyers, but I wouldn't say she's exceptional just based on that.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The guy's name was Bernard Shiffman. More info can be found here.