Well, it’s happened again.
A major law firm has exposed secret information because it did not properly redact a court filing.
It is the oldest screw-up in the technology book, yet it happens with surprising frequency and by lawyers who you might think should know better.
It happened earlier this year to defense lawyers for Paul Manafort. It happened in 2017 to attorneys at the U.S. Department of Justice in a Libor-rigging case against a former Deutsche Bank trader.
This time, it was lawyers at the law firm Jones Day, who, as The National Law Journal reported, failed to properly redact secret grand jury testimony in a public filing in federal court.
After a reporter discovered the error and a magistrate-judge asked the firm to explain itself, Jones Day responded with a letter to the court that is a masterpiece in the use of lawyerspeak for defensive obfuscation — even attempting to shift blame to the reporter who discovered the error by accusing him of “exploiting a technical weakness.”
Of course, not everyone is so proficient in lawyerspeak. So, as a public service, and as someone who follows the trials and tribulation of lawyers’ technology competence and incompetence, I offer this annotated version of the Jones Day letter, in which I translate the lawyerspeak into everyday language that conveys what I think they really meant to say. The annotations are in italics.
We respectfully submit this letter in response to the Court’s Order to Show Cause dated September 11, 2019, which directed counsel to file a written explanation regarding the redaction error in the Reply Memorandum filed in Support of Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss. (Please, please, please, Your Honor, let us off the hook.)
We assure the Court that we redacted information in the Reply
