Page 8 - Dallas Vol 5 No 2

Why
Smart People
Make Dumb Email Mistakes (and How to Stop Them)
The Bank of England employs some of the United Kingdom’s smartest and most accom- plished professionals. Senior
executives frequently hold advanced degrees from Oxford or Cambridge and are recruited from positions at top investment banks.
But sterling credentials did not help one senior banker who in 2015 acci- dentally emailed a highly con dential study of the economic implications of Brexit to an editor at the Guardian newspaper. e mistake made head- lines around England and as a result the bank banned its elite workforce from using the auto ll feature in their email.
Lawyers, like bankers, su er when emailing goes awry. e legal insurer ALAS reported that in 2014 alone, it reserved more than $60 million against claims related to harmful emails.
So why are professionals who stake their reputations on exercising good judgment laid low by email mis- takes? ough it is cold comfort to the lawyer who has just accidentally forwarded con dential information to opposing counsel, intelligence and expertise themselves might be cul- prits. A growing body of research sug- gests that smart people and experts are more likely to make certain kinds of mistakes. ey take mental short- cuts in order to focus their attention on their highest priority tasks and may skim over rote or uninteresting details, unconsciously relying on their background knowledge and reason- ing skills to ll in gaps in evidence or attention.
BY PETER NORMAN
To the lawyer who is preoccupied mentally composing a trenchant rebuttal or juggling several time- sensitive deadlines, typing in the ad- dresses to an email may be the rote or uninteresting part of a larger process. And while a high-pro le snafu might temporarily cause the lawyer to pay more attention to addressing emails, such mistakes are rare enough for any given individual that in the course of sending dozens of emails per day, she is likely to soon dri back to her old habits.
It is notoriously di cult to train people to overcome their own bi- ases, as psychologist Daniel Kahne- man argued in his book, “ inking, Fast and Slow.” But better designed email programs might help. Existing email applications typically give us- ers only two options for addressing their emails. e rst option, typing in all email addresses manually, as the Bank of England now requires, is a long and cumbersome process that might itself create errors by en- couraging users to mentally ll in gaps rather than think through each address. e alternative, using tradi- tional shortcut features like the reply- all button and auto ll, clearly fails to help users make accurate selections or give them feedback about possible problems.
Is there a third way for email, a set of tools that improve on reply-all and auto ll and allow users to address emails both more quickly and more accurately? In full disclosure, this is exactly what my company has at- tempted to build with our ReplyTo- Some application.
In the meantime, there are certain strategies to help protect against er- rors that you can use with your exist- ing email program. One is to develop the habit of addressing your email last, a er dra ing the body. is has a couple of advantages. First, it pro- tects against accidentally sending out an email before it has been fully written and reviewed. Second, think- ing through the content rst helps to focus the mind on the separate task of deciding who it should go to.
Another strategy is to set a delay timer that will hold messages in your outbox for a certain period of time a er you press send, allowing you to take advantage of the common ten- dency to be a better writer and edi- tor a er sending the email. e delay timer will allow you to reopen the email and edit or even delete it before it is sent out. e set-up process is a bit involved, but a Harvard Business Review article, “Prevent Email Horror with a 2-Minute Send Delay” sets out step-by-step instructions.
If legal geniuses are more suscep- tible to email mistakes, the good news is that they can use their smarts to develop strategies for shoring up their weaknesses. Good email safety strategies can ensure that the quality of your expertise and not a second of distraction de nes your reputation.
PETER NORMAN CO-FOUNDED WIN- NIEWARE LLC, A SOFTWARE COMPANY THAT DEVELOPS USER-CENTERED SO- LUTIONS TO PROBLEMS. PREVIOUSLY, PETER WAS A LAWYER AT ARENT FOX AND MILBANK TWEED, AND IN-HOUSE AT SUNEDISON. LEARN MORE ABOUT HIS TEAM’S FLAGSHIP APPLICATION AT WWW.REPLYTOSOME.COM.
ATTORNEY AT LAW MAGAZINE · DALLAS· VOL. 5 NO. 2 8