Ethical Issues of the 21st Century

This past January, when The New York Times published that Eli Lilly & Co. was engaged in settlement discussions with the government regarding the company's alleged marketing improprieties related to its Zyprexa' schizophrenia drug, the company accused federal officials of leaking the information to the press. They were misguided. To Lilly's surprise, an internal investigation revealed that the unlikely and unintentional source of the press leak was not the government at all. The “leaker” was one of Lilly's own outside counsel. How did this happen? The lawyer, doing what each of us has done at one time or another, writing confidential information in an e-mail to co-counsel at another firm (or a client), inadvertently sent the e-mail to a reporter at the Times because of the remarkably convenient, yet insidiously dangerous, “auto-complete” feature of e-mail. That feature proposed the recipient name “Berenson, Alex,” instead of “Berenson, Bradford,” the intended recipient of the e-mail. Berenson the reporter claimed that even though he received the e-mail from the Lilly lawyer, he actually developed his detailed information from other sources. That is cold comfort to the author of the e-mail, and probably even colder comfort to the client whose activity and strategy was disclosed.