The WSJ's Law Blog reports on the law firm that rescinded its offer to the co-founder of AutoAdmit:
The Law Blog has learned that law firm Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge rescinded its job offer to Anthony Ciolli, the 3L at Penn Law who resigned as "Chief Education Director" of AutoAdmit last month. He resigned in the wake of a WaPo exposé on how the site in part served as a platform for attacks and defamatory remarks about female law students, among others....
Charles DeWitt..., managing partner at Edwards Angell's Boston office, where Ciolli was slated to be a litigation associate, told the Law Blog: "He worked for us last summer. He's not going to work for us in the fall."
Ciolli took time from working on final exams to talk to the Law Blog. "Three years of legal education has been wasted because of an unmoderated message board," he said, adding, "The timing is absolutely horrible." The 23-year-old, who contributes to First Movers, a blog written by law students and graduates, added that "I don't know what I'm going to do next."
The Law Blog reviewed correspondence between Ciolli and the firm, and here's how it went down:
On April 11, just over a month after the WaPo story ran, DeWitt sent a letter to Ciolli stating that the firm had recently learned of the controversy involving AutoAdmit, in particular its "off-topic" message board, and that "the information we now have raises serious concerns about your joining our firm."
DeWitt wrote that the content of the messages on the board are "antithetical" to the values of the firm and the "principles of collegiality and respect that members of the legal profession should observe in their dealings with other lawyers." DeWitt pointed out that in an online letter to another blogger, Ciolli and his partner Jarret Cohen identified themselves as AutoAdmit's administrators and defended its "free, uninhibited exchange of ideas."
DeWitt continued: "We expect any lawyer affiliated with our firm, when presented with the kind of language exhibited on the message board, to reject it and to disavow any affiliation with it. You, instead, facilitated the expression and publication of such language. . . . " He wrote, his resignation from the site was "too late to ameliorate our concerns."
Read more here.
This story is a cautionary tale. Many students discover the hard way that the working world won't tolerate all kinds of things that are routinely tolerated in academia and encouraged on the Internet.
More Ivey Files postings on AutoAdmit here and here, and on the "Say Everything" culture here.