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A $1 Billion Email Gaffe
Jake writes in with the story behind an explosive NYTimes scoop last week. It seems that the Times's pharmaceutical industry reporter, Alex Berenson, scored a page-one blockbuster when he revealed that Eli Lilly was looking to reach a settlement with federal prosecutors over the company's alleged inappropriate marketing of anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa. A settlement figure of $1 billion was mentioned. This scoop dropped into Berenson's inbox when a lawyer for one of Lilly's retained firms mis-addressed an email to a colleague with the same last name as that of the Times reporter. Some online observers are speculating that auto-complete is to blame, but this has not been confirmed.
Update: 02/08 17:19 GMT by KD : Jake writes in with an update: it seems that while Berenson did receive a misdirected e-mail from Pepper Hamilton, that e-mail did not contain a detailed description of the status of the Eli Lilly settlement talks. Berenson got his story from other sources.
Update: 02/08 17:19 GMT by KD : Jake writes in with an update: it seems that while Berenson did receive a misdirected e-mail from Pepper Hamilton, that e-mail did not contain a detailed description of the status of the Eli Lilly settlement talks. Berenson got his story from other sources.
Don't click the link, goes to shock site and screwes with your browser.
this is my sig
Whats to blame is the psychiatrists. They're virtually trained (and not by the big pharams, though they don't help) that meds are the cure to everything, as opposed to psychologists. I remember reading statistics showing that the VAST majority of people who go see a psychiatrist end up with a prescription, regardless of if they truly had problems.
The best example is the insane amount of kids with an ADD diagnostic... sure, there ARE people who are truly chemically imbalanced and such, and need treatments of some kind...I really feel for these people. The rest just need some discipline stuck in their head. As far as I know (and I know quite a few people in the field), most people getting these prescriptions don't even pass a fraction of the tests that would be required to make a proper diagnostic. The psychiatrist just go by "guts feeling".
And then you end up on mind control medication.... You're "better", but you're not "you" anymore... Some treatments are required... some mental illness CAN be treated... but in general, whats available right now is just a big cash cow, not treatments.
The headline is misleading. Eli Lilly was going to pay the $1 billion anyway, regardless of who received the email. They simply didn't want anyone to know about that.
I'll create an amusing sig when I have something meaningful to post.
If these guys would use PGP or some other form of encryption, then even if you did send something critical like that to the wrong address, it wouldn't be so devastating. The technology to protect email has been around for nearly twenty years.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
But schizoaffective disorder is a devastating illness: it's just like being manic-depressive and schizophrenic at the same time. The risperdal I took previously for my psychotic symptoms wasn't working anymore. From 2003 through 2007, I was in the emergency room five times for psychiatric reasons, culminating in an ambulance ride to the mental ward, where I stayed for three weeks.
The Zyprexa completely eliminates the paranoia and visual hallucinations I would otherwise have almost all the time. It also brought me down from the bipolar mania that led to my ambulance ride, and prevents me from getting manic anymore.
As a result of taking it, I am able to hold a steady job - and a good one - as a software engineer, to provide for my wife and to pay her University tuition.
I've heard rumours that Zyprexa might be withdrawn from the market. I really hope that doesn't happen, as I've never had a medicine work so well.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Mod points wasted. AAAL, and I assure you it doesn't, any more than reading your signature creates a contractual obligation on my part to mod your posts "Informative" or send you money.
Also, since settlement information is excluded from evidence when trying to prove culpability, and never reaches the finder of fact in a court case anyway, this whole story is pretty pointless. While the leak may have a modest effect on stock prices, the fact that Eli Lilly attempted to settle and the amount in question couldn't possibly matter less in the case at bar.
Push the delete key.
(I'm not kidding. You start typing the name, watch it pop-up, keyboard cursor up/down to highlight the offending entry, push the delete key.)
The thing to vitally remember with Outlook is that the Autocomplete is based on the *nickname* list (NK2 file) which has absoultely NOTHING to do with your contacts list, global address list or address book contents (this is why you can have addresses in autocomplete that aren't in your contacts list and vice versa. It also autocompletes to how you type them in - if you type in someone's name instead of their SAM account name.)
Deleting entries as I described is the only officially supported way of editing the NK2 file. There is at least one third party program that tries to edit it, and you can, of course, delete the file and empty the whole list. It's somewhere in the Application Data directory of your profile.
I heard from corporate counsel at a previous job that, at least up here in Canada, it is *not* legally binding. The company still used them, but they viewed it more as a request ("please delete this"), with maybe a little scare tactic ("or legal consequences may apply") thrown in for good measure.
IF it helps, Shift + Del will remove an entry from the autocomplete list.
But yeah, sort by most used would have been wise...
If you give me your television, and a piece of paper saying that "I give you my television" then legally, you have given me your television - no doubt about it. Not many courts in any jurisdiction would say, "No, you didn't really give him your television".
You do not need a consideration to give someone a gift. Unless, of course, you are no fun at birthdays, Christmas and other similar times.
If you publish something under the GPL, then it was your intention to let me use it. Giving away rights (including ownership or a licence to use something) requires intent, not consideration.
This sig is intentionally blank
Posting without a Karma bonus because I just want to make sure that this poster understands the situation:
Yes, that's right, it absolutely won't have an effect on negotiations. That was the point of the post, to assure you that as a matter of law, their bargaining position hasn't been compromised at all because the settlement information can't come in at trial anyway (and the strength of each side's case are the bargaining chips in negotiations, not some dollar amount that the press accidentally found out.) Generally, any information obtained during negotiations, or even in this case--the incredibly boring revelation that negotiations took place--cannot come in as evidence at trial. This is an well-known evidentiary rule, and the point of it is that there is a strong public policy concern for encouraging settlements between parties, so as to not needlessly burden the judicial system. And the best way to encourage settlements is to make sure that the parties can be as candid with each other during negotiations as possible without having to worry that what they say can be used against them at trial. Both parties are free to continue negotiating. No harm, no foul.
That's why the information revealed in this leak doesn't matter, and why the focus of the story is on the far more interesting [i]way[/i] it was leaked. The prosecution cannot utter a word about this at trial, regardless of what the press knows or doesn't know. Eli Lilly is still in great shape, they just might want to consider getting different counsel! Was this an embarrassing screwup by the lawyer? Absolutely. Will it have any kind of extrinsic effect, like causing a dip in stock prices? [i]Maybe[/i]. But will it matter in a potential trial, and therefore prove damaging to Lilly's position during during negotiations? Absolutely not.
The California Supreme Court disqualified a law firm in Rico v. Mitsubishi Motors for using inadvertently-produced privileged information. The facts are particular, but the holding is by its own terms broad: if you get an inadvertent, privileged e-mail, you can only read it to the extent necessary to realize it is privileged and inadvertent; then you must delete all copies of it and notify the sender.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
I guess the question is, how do you know if you aren't the intended recipient?
I think it's pretty simple. If the email is in your inbox, then you're the intended recipient.
If the law firm didn't want this getting out, they shouldn't have emailed it to a reporter.