There's bending the rules of your company's IT 'acceptable use' policy, and then there's taking the rulebook and just throwing it out the window.


US firm Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom has a wonderfully zesty blog written about it called the Skadden Insider, penned by two serving legal beagles. Sadly, their eager noses were recently slapped by master after they posted pictures of female lawyers at Skadden under the blog entry 'Hottest Female Associate'.



Skadden itself seems to have used a rather light touch with the whole affair, merely issuing a missive saying that, while it understands that 'blogs are prevalent in today's culture and blogs about Skadden are to be expected', the firm believes 'the "contests" on one of these blogs is inappropriate and does not reflect our values and standards of behaviour'.



Skadden's head of employment law, Henry Baer, wrote the note to 'urge the authors of the blog to consider both the privacy and feelings of the affected attorneys and to discontinue the contests'. The fact that the email came from the Skadden man responsible for knowing exactly how to fire people obviously had nothing to do with the instant removal of all the pictures from the blog.