Ooops! Addleshaw Goddard in massive HR email cock-up
25 January 2013
A member of Addleshaw Goddard's HR team has mistakenly emailed every trainee's performance ratings to the entire firm.

A junior member of the team sent details of the upcoming trainee seat moves to the firm. But the hapless HR staffer also managed to attach to the email the "HR trainee tracker" - which contains details of how individual trainees performed in all their seats. Ooops.

Advice to Addleshaw Goddard's HR department

A recall request was quickly sent out, thereby alerting recipients that there was something juicy to be read. In any event, an insider tells RollOnFriday that the email "was open on far too many computers by this point for this to make a difference" and the follow-up email detailing the manger's sincerest apologies was "far too little too late".

Which could be the case, given that RollOnFriday's data protection expert reckons the blunder could be sufficiently serious to attract enforcement by the Information Commissioner.

A spokesman for the firm said that "a firmwide communication regarding seat moves unfortunately also contained by mistake private information relating to individual trainees. The error was quickly spotted and steps were taken immediately to prevent any further publication of the material. We are reviewing our processes and have apologised to our trainees".