A year ago, we wrote about a popular law student message board/forum called AutoAdmit that was making some female law students upset, as they claimed sexist messages on those boards were making it difficult
for them to find a job. The reasoning didn't make that much sense. The messages, while certainly crude, seemed unlikely to be the sort that would keep an employer from hiring. They basically just made comments about the women's appearances. There was no evidence at all that the postings kept the women from getting jobs. Not surprisingly, though, considering that we're talking about law students, it didn't take long for lawsuits to be filed
, including one against a Penn State law student named Anthony Ciolli, who was an editor of AutoAdmit, but had no direct involvement with the content that upset the women. In November, Ciolli was dropped
from the lawsuit, but not before all of the attention had cost him his job
at a high-paying law firm.
Once again, given that we're talking about a bunch of lawyers, it will probably surprise no one to discover that Ciolli has now filed a lawsuit against the two women who had sued him originally
, charging them with libel for falsely dragging his name into the mess. The whole thing seems like a giant disaster that's only likely to get worse before it works itself out. So far, the lesson seems to be that some lawyers are pretty thin-skinned and likely to file lawsuits over just about anything. But, perhaps we already knew that. Perhaps we should be happy that they're just filing lawsuits against each other, rather than bothering everyone else with unnecessary lawsuits.