They Humiliated a Colleague at Work. Were They Wrong?

Sometimes at work, people need to be taught a lesson if they’ve been out of line.

It’s never pretty but once in a while, it just has to be done.

This brings us to today’s story from Reddit’s “Am I the A**hole?” page.

Read on to see what happened and let us know if you think this person was out of line.

AITA for replying-all and humiliating my colleague at work?

“I am an in-house lawyer at a large MNC.

I provide legal advice to the various internal departments of the MNC. I have one colleague from the sales department, however, who always copies me into the middle of his email chains with external affiliated companies, asking me to provide legal advice to these affiliated entities. He does this without any courtesy heads-up beforehand, or any context provided.

Initially, I was polite and told him not to do so, as these external affiliates have their own legal departments, and I should not be advising them and taking on unnecessary risk exposure for our company. I would also be sacrificing privilege. He said he understood, but after a few weeks would do the same thing. Finally, the other day he did it again, but this time with an external affiliated company that my company may have a potential dispute with.

In my anger, I removed all external parties from the thread, and replied-all to the people remaining on the thread from my company: “Bill (not his real name), you have to STOP dropping your legal counsel into the middle of email threads with external parties without any heads-up or context.

My job is to advise our company, and NOT to advise counterparties with whom we might have potential disputes. You CANNOT keep doing this. You are compromising our company’s interests. Please tell your team too.”

Bill did not reply to my email, and afterwards a few of our mutual colleagues told me I had gone too far. I understand that I could have been more civil, but I was frustrated because Bill has been doing this consistently and had not appeared to internalize my more polite previous warnings.

My subordinates (who were on the thread) were all happy though, and I overheard some of them quoting my email to each other with relish (they didn’t know I could hear them). It turns out that they have all experienced the same thing from Bill’s team.

AITA?”