It’s been fairly common practice lately for BigLaw memos to be leaked to third parties (hat tip Above The Law).

While targetting employees with different letters has always been a theoretical concern, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook seems to have run the second large-scale operation in this area.  The first was Tesla, who found and fired the leak. 

According to Valleywag, Zuckerberg sent out an internal memo announcing the departure of Facebook CFO Gideon Yu, which was subsequently leaked and posted to blogs across the internet.  Another leak of the same document yields very subtle differences: passive voice where it was previously active, changes in punctuation, the addition or elimination of names or titles, etc.

Of course, two examples doesn’t make a trend, but it’s still a good concern to consider.  In the worst-case scenario, your firm could write a program to randomly generate a version of a memo just for you, which could flag you as the source of the leak just by copying and pasting one paragraph of the leak into the program.  It sounds complex, but it’s really not: Replace a “will work diligently” with a “will diligently work,” a “will inform” with a “will be informing,” a “we are” with a “we’re,” and all of a sudden the program is very simple and you’re in some serious trouble.

Recommendation:  If you really want to leak that document, find a “leak buddy” and compare your memos to make sure they’re identical.  A program could be written for that too, of course.

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4. Work Relationships on Social Networking Sites Can Lead to Liability