I Wanted to Title This "Only in America," but It Turns Out to Have Happened in England, so Apparentl

[queerbychoice]

"The IT Department installed a filter that bounces any e-mail with the word 'sex' in it, including in attachments.

Including any legal agreements that say 'References to any sex or gender shall include every other sex or gender,' or prohibit discrimination on grounds of sex, or any number of other clauses which are perfectly innocuous even by the standards of the average fictional maiden aunt.

Result: one of my colleagues now has a 48-hour deadline where he should had two weeks.

Grr."
posted in lizw's journal

::gapes::

::rubs eyes, shakes head, rereads to see if it can possibly be true::

::wanders away muttering incredulously::

Comments

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Only in England, you mean :-)

(I work for a law firm in London).

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Surely not! I'd been assured repeatedly that the British are more sensible than us over here!

Well, I suppose you people are to blame for originally producing the Puritans after all . . . though you did have the good sense to harass them all into sailing over here on the Mayflower and leaving you alone. Only, it seems that the Mayflower left one behind, in your IT department.

Now I must figure out what to do with the title of my post. Perhaps I'll just cross it out.

[(Anonymous)]

Haven't you been asked to sign any confidentiality undertaking in respect of internal matters within the firm, then?

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Nope. I don't even have a written contract, and nor do the partners. It's an unusual firm :-)

[(Anonymous)]

I don't believe this would be true.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Believe what you like. People who matter to me know I don't lie.

[(Anonymous)]

Fine but if anyone is silly enough to try to put a filter system on a law firm's computer which stops any e-mail or attachment which uses the word "sex" (which is in fact a completely innocuous word in many contexts) then the filter is not going to survive for more than a day or two in a properly run firm. The definitions sections in thousands of legal documents refer to the word "sex" in incorporating the masculine and the feminine. Documents in matrimonial cases often refer to the word "sex" as a matter of course. Employment law cases frequently refer to the word "sex" (e.g. discrimination under the Sex Discrimination Act 1975), etc, and a law firm which keeps such a filter in place would be liable to be sued by its own clients for negligence if that led to documentation not being progressed properly and this caused loss or damage to the client. I don't therefore believe that your filter could remain in place for very long.

Presumably the filter has now been removed already?

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Dear Anonymous Person:

You have such faith in the notion that all firms are properly run.

Are you the same Anonymous Perosn who already dodged my questions about your identity? It would be much more polite of you if you would a pick a name to sign yourself by, so as to help distinguish between you and the other Anonymous People commenting here.

[(Anonymous)]

No law firm in England worth its salt would put a filter on the word "sex" except by an accident committed by a non-lawyer who does not know really what he/she was doing or understand the firm's business, and it couldn't survive for very long.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Yes, it has been removed on the instructions of my colleague.

[(Anonymous)]

So why hold English law firms out to ridicule then?

Just because you have some prat in yours?

[theobscure.livejournal.com]

In high school, our computers had a system that did the same thing. The software also edited any email sent from/read on a school computer to removed curse words. Granted, a law firm is fairly well removed from high school, but it is possible. Most companies can and do monitor all internet activity on their computers, anyway.

[theobscure.livejournal.com]

"to removed"

err... "to remove"