The trouble at Franklin D. Azar & Associates PC began with pornographic spam.
Last May the Aurora, Colo., law firm was being bombarded with offensive messages, and enough of it was seeping through the
company's spam filters that employees complained to management, and IT administrator Kevin Rea was told to do something.
Read the latest WhitePaper - IP Surveillance - The Next Generation Security Camera Application
What happened next, as detailed in federal court filings, shows how the fight against spammers can backfire. Spammers have
been using increasingly sophisticated techniques to evade filters, so that over the past few years and despite predictions
to the contrary, unsolicited e-mail continues to plague businesses worldwide.
On the morning of May 21, Rea dialed up the spam settings on the Barracuda Spam Firewall 200 Azar & Associates was using to block unwanted mail. The changes made it harder for spam to land on the desktops of company
employees but they also had one unforeseen consequence: The Barracuda Networks appliance began blocking e-mail from the U.S.
District Court for the District of Colorado, including a notice advising company lawyers of a May 30 hearing in a civil lawsuit.
Azar & Associates lawyers blew their court date, and this week the judge overseeing the matter ordered the company to pay
attorney fees and expenses incurred by the lawyers who showed up representing the other side of the case. Rea did not return
a call seeking comment on the matter.
What happened to Azar & Associates is unusual, but reflects a legitimate worry for law firms.
"This is an IT guy's nightmare if you work in a law firm," said Matt Kesner, CTO with Fenwick & West LLP, a Bay Area law firm
with about 250 attorneys. "It doesn't take a very high percentage of false-positives in the antispam world to misidentify
a crucial piece of correspondence."
Fenwick & West has missed e-mailed court notices in the past, although it has not blown court dates as a consequence, Kesner
said.
Over the past 10 years U.S. state and federal courts have increasingly done business electronically in a move to become more
efficient and more environmentally friendly.
The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.
