Email Disclaimers

I remember when I found out the passing results of my first bar exam, I turned to my boss and said, "It's official. I'm now the butt of thousands of lawyer jokes." Sometimes the stereotype matches the reality. Let's take a tendancy for verbosity, for example. Today I received a five page email at work that, substantively, was no more than a page and half long.

The remaining three and half pages were composed of all the email disclaimers tacked to the message as it was replied to and forwarded from attorney to attorney. A new IRS circular published a couple months ago has only added another paragraph to every lawyer's standard email disclaimer. I guess we can never be too careful...or too much of a self-parody.