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When it comes to leaked e-mails, such as the one that, er, spilled out of Baker & McKenzie last week, law firms have plenty of form.

Yum-gate, that infamous e-mail exchange between a Norton Rose assistant and his former girlfriend, set the benchmark for all subsequent e-mail leaks, although Hammonds’ urine-related tabloid brush earlier his year had its admirers.

Now we have ‘Ketchup-gate’, a heady brew stirred up by a secretary’s withering response to a request by an associate for £4 to pay for a ketchup stain on his trousers to be removed. The affair has generated more publicity for Bakers than it could hope to achieve in a month of Sundays for its normal business activities.

Perhaps law firms are more vulnerable to such leaks because the legal community in the City is such a tight-knit one. Everybody knows, and e-mails, everybody else. The excitement generated by the visit of a group of Clifford Chance partners to Spearmint Rhino in 2002 also shows that law firms are expected to operate to a higher moral code than the rest of us. And, of course, tabloid editors like nothing better than stories about fat cat City lawyers making a spectacle of themselves.

But any law firm tempted to use this affair as an excuse to send out a holier-than-thou missive alerting its clients to the dangers of e-mails should resist the urge. The inherent dangers of e-mails as a way of communicating anything but the mundane are blindingly obvious. Such a missive would be especially superfluous in this case because it doesn’t fall into the realm of business affairs. We’re not talking about the smoking gun that sparked the collapse of Andersen, notwithstanding the memorable headline ‘World fury over saucy e-mail’ ( see The Diary).

Bakers is surely right to assert that the e-mail exchange is a private affair. Aside from banning the use of e-mails as a means of communication there is little it could have done to prevent it. Still, as a general rule of thumb it is always a good idea to avoid using the words ‘ketchup’, ‘trousers’ and ‘stains’ in your e-mail — manna from heaven for tabloid headline writers and broadsheet columnists alike.

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