Legal Village

Watch your language

Posted 19/04/2007 by Christoph von Teichman

Probably not a lot of people in Europe took an interest in what happened a few days ago to a radio talk show host in New York called Don Imus.

I did because I remember Imus from the early 1970s when I was living in New York and he was just a regular DJ on morning radio; what made his shows more entertaining than most were his comedy routines and his occasional phone calls (under some fake identity) to unsuspecting people, whom he would then proceed to entrap in the most bizarre conversations, testing their credulity by ever more outrageous assertions.

I even own an LP (anyone out there old enough to remember LPs?) with some of his funniest spoofs, called "1,200 Hamburgers To Go"; in the eponymous episode Imus calls up a local McDonald's restaurant pretending to be a National Guard officer and orders 1,200 hamburgers to go to feed his troops during an exercise. The hapless guy answering the phone doesn't suspect a thing, not even when Imus gets into the details of his order - "hold the mustard on 372, extra mayo on 125" and so on.

That's pretty funny. What put Imus in the news recently isn't. For those of you who didn't follow the story, on one of his morning programmes - which over the last 30 years had somehow morphed into a talk show with a guest list that reads like a Who's Who of US politics and journalism - Imus got to talking with his sidekick about a women's college basketball team comprising mostly black players, whom he referred to by using a racial/sexist slur (the meaning of which I must confess escaped me until I looked it up in an online dictionary).

Of course, this was meant as a joke, in typical shock-jock mode, but it didn't go down too well with the US public. After a week of increasing furore in the media, Imus was gone, his show cancelled and his name disgraced.

Leaving my nostalgic memories of 1973 New York to one side, why is this of any interest to anyone in Europe, let alone to law firms? I think you don't have to be an advocate of political correctness to note that many Europeans have a somewhat cavalier attitude towards the sensitivities of groups other than their own.

It's not just the tabloid press that is constantly using negative ethnic stereotypes (being German, I know what I'm talking about - reading English papers is rarely an enjoyable experience). For example, 'jokes' about Poles stealing cars used to be a staple for one of the most popular comedians on German television - surely he meant no harm, but how did the Poles feel about it?

As many countries in Europe become more ethnically and culturally diverse I think it is high time for Europeans to take such issues much more seriously. There is, if you like, a moral side to them - a simple question of treating other people with the respect they deserve.

But for law firms and other large organisations, there is a risk management aspect as well. In today's world, almost nothing that is said or written can be relied upon to remain private. E-mails, even voicemail messages, may get out on to the internet and start circling the globe in a matter of minutes; I can think of at least one highly successful lawyer whose career was basically destroyed by a stupid ethnic joke in an internal e-mail that was then leaked.

And it's not just individual reputations that are at stake - it's that of our firms as well. Which is why we have every reason to make sure that everyone in our firms is conscious of the need to be respectful of ethnic, religious, sexual and other minorities, and that appropriate training and complaints-handling facilities are in place - out of a healthy sense of self-preservation as much as a simple desire to have people behave with decency.