I Can’t Believe I Sent it to the Whole Listserve

A recurring theme on the ever-fabulous AALS contracts list-serve involves pressing “reply to all” accidentally.  The list is a fabulous resource, but over the years it has seen its share of embarrassments (because it automatically replies to all when you hit reply, leading many to conclude that maybe that default rule should be changed, yet somehow it remains reply to all, despite the fact that everyone on the list is teaching contracts law and thus understand default rules and should realize that this is a penalty default, with too much information seemingly forced from us and onto the entire listserve, nonetheless we all have to live the consequences of this particularly onerous penalty default, including this horrible run-on sentence). 

We all have experience with this, and I can speak personally.  That law firm associate who accidentally hit “reply all” when responding to the inquiry about workload?  That would be me, informing everyone at the law firm that I indeed was satisfied with my current work assignments (hey, it could have been worse).  But sometimes it seems that people “reply all” strategically.  They *want* everyone to know something good that they did.  So someone sends an email out to an entire list, making public their donation to the homeless shelter.  Other times, someone wants to embarrass the person who sent the original email by picking apart some mistake in the original email.  It’s framed as a private reply, of course, but it goes to everyone.  Of course the author, if asked, will try to play it off as a mistake. “Ooops, sorry, didn’t mean for that to go the whole list.”  Sure, sure, we believe you… What’s the best / worst example of “reply y’alling” that ya’ll can think of?

[Miriam Cherry / Cross-Posted at Concurring Opinions]