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[Music] hi I'm Annie Fitzsimmons I'm your Washington Realtors Legal Hotline lawyer and today we are once again reaching into the Legal Hotline mailbag and I love this question because in you know a whole lot of years that I've been doing this this is the first time I've ever received this question but it is extraordinarily relevant and here's the question this question came from a designated broker when I am responding to an email should I hit reply to sender only or should I hit reply to all I had to think carefully about the answer to this question and realized that the answer is different depending on who the sender of the email is from and this answer is going to apply to more than just designated brokers so don't tune out if you're not a designated broker but the first part of the answer does pertain to anybody who's in a management position it doesn't have to be the designated broker you might be a team leader you might be managing broker or you might just be a broker who is providing advice or counsel to another broker so if you are acting in that capacity and you get an email from somebody who is looking to you for advice and that email includes recipients the email that they send to you includes recipients who you may or may not recognize and you're going to respond to the broker who's asking this question of you seeking advice then think critically about whether or not you want your answer to go to all those people who were included in the brokers email to you it may be that the broker sends you a question asking you about a transaction because the broker on the other side of the transaction is challenging them and so maybe your broker wants that other broker to know that they are going to a higher authority they're asking their manager whether or not what they did is correct and so they include the other broker from the the broker for the other side of the transaction and maybe there's been an even a dispute between the parties and so they include their own clients in this question now if it turns out that your broker was in the wrong or that there's multiple views to this question or that for any reason your answer to this broker could be less than comfortable for your broker to have read by the broker on the other side of the transaction or by their client then by all means do not reply to all just because your broker asked you the question and included other people as recipients of the question does not mean that in your answer you have to reply to all okay maybe that seems self-evident let's take the question from another perspective you're a broker and I don't care now if you're a broker or managing broker doesn't need a broker you receive an email from another broker the broker on the other side of the transaction and there are people included in this recipient list who you don't recognize and maybe the broke what may be one of the recipients is actually the broker on the other side of the transactions client so let's say your firm represents the buyer listing broker has sent you an email and there's somebody whose email address you don't recognize it could be the seller it also may be escrow or title or the inspector or any other number of people and so the question is do you hit reply to all and the answer is I can't answer that question for you you're a professional right you are a professional and so in your capacity as a professional you are going to have to think critically about who the other recipients to this email are if you're the buyer's broker and you hit reply to all and you send an email to the seller have you violated a code of ethics or an MLS rule and the answer I really don't know the answer to those questions because as the hotline lawyer I neither in turf nor enforce the code of ethics nor any MLS rules so you are really truly gonna have to ask your own local Association on your own MLS that question beyond that question though is it prudent to send your reply to somebody whose identity you don't know now on one side of this question I've had a broker argue to me if the broker who sends me the question thinks it's important to have all these people in the conversation then all of these people already know the issue is out there all of these people should then also know my reply because my reply will be professional and accurate etc etc that's one perspective and it's not necessarily a wrong perspective but I don't accept it at face value instead I say as a professional you have to evaluate this situation case by case and critically analyze whether or not you should push the send button not knowing who might receive this email or even maybe you do recognize all of the email addresses if that's the case then think about each one do I want this person to get the answer do I want this person to get the answer do I want this person to get the answer because just because the email came to you with a bunch of other recipients does not mean that you as a professional want to send your reply back to all of those same people maybe you do maybe you don't only you can make that decision and only you can make that decision after you really think about the issue case by case if you want to talk about it send an email to me Legal Hotline at W a realtor dot org thank you for being a Washington Realtors member