Remedial measures to combat spam cost firm.
As all e-mail users know, spam, or unsolicited e-mail impacts businesses worldwide, and spammers are always devising newer and more sophisticated techniques to evade firewalls and spam filters.
In May 2006, one US law firm being bombarded with spam decided to combat the problem, and the firm’s IT administrator adjusted the spam settings on the firm’s firewall to make it harder for spam to end up on the computers of the firm’s staff.
Unfortunately, the adjustments to the spam filter had an unforeseen consequence and the filter blocked e-mail from the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, including a notice advising the firm of a pending hearing in a civil suit.
Consequently, the firm’s lawyers missed the court date. Earlier this month the presiding judge fined the firm and ordered them to pay attorney fees and expenses incurred by opposing counsel. These fees and expenses could cost several thousand dollars.
Missed court dates and appointments happen when litigants are notified by regular mail. And other firms have missed e-mailed court notices, but missing is a court date is unusual. Still, this is a nightmare scenario for law firms because it doesn’t take a lot of false positives for a spam filter to misidentify a key e-mail.
Led by the federal court system, US courts increasingly provide notice and conduct business electronically – a move made both to become more efficient and more environmentally friendly. Many federal courts, including all district courts, use an electronic document system called Case Management/Electronic Case Filing (“CM/ECF”). The appellate courts will also soon adopt the same standard.
One simple way to avoid the problem illustrated here is to add the federal courts, which use the uscourts.gov domain, to a so-called “whitelist” of approved e-mail senders. Indeed the presiding judge criticized the firm for having failed to do just that. Even with whitelists though there is an opportunity for human error because they are manually maintained.
Another possible solution is to use several e-mail filtering systems that are considered to have a low frequency of error. IT administrators might also consider programming spam filters to allow more spam than they otherwise might in order to avoid this nightmare scenario.
Despite the persistence of spammers though, commentators believe that this decision is a departure from the norm and that the CM/ECF system is here to stay.
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