Here is Lisa Kennelly's interview of me, which was posted yesterday at LexBlog's Real Lawyers Have Blogs.
My thanks to Lisa for contacting me and asking some questions that are harder to answer than they may seem.
Last week, at LegalTech New York, I attended a program on Twitter, the latest social media phenomenon. The panel was moderated by Monica Bay, editor-in-chief of Law Technology News, and was made up by Matt Homann, lawyer and author of the [non]billable hour blog; Kevin O’Keefe, CEO of LexBlog; and Chris Winfield, CEO of www.10e20.com.
Robert Ambrogi, a Massachusetts lawyer and technology expert, introduced everyone. In addition to his blogs, Media Law and Law Sites,, and wrote an article in the December 2008 edition of Law Technology News entitled “Tweet Sixteen,” in which he gave 16 reasons for lawyers to use Twitter.
Chris Winfield said the goal of Twitter is to be able to answer what you are doing at any one time. Twitter has a 140 character limit, the same as other text messages, so necessarily the messages are brief.
He explained that when he was preparing his presentation, he Twittered three questions:
1. How would you explain Twitter in 140 characters or less?
2. What is your “one” must-have Twitter tool?
3. How could a lawyer or someone in the legal field use Twitter effectively?
He said that he received 135 responses in 30 minutes and then turned those responses into his presentation. Chris also discussed the presentation and his research approach in this post on his blog, 10e20 Blog.
Matt Homann explained that although he has been on Twitter for the past two and a half years, he has only used it for the last six months, because it took him that long to understand its utility.
Matt also blogged about his presentation in Ten Tweets about Twitter. You can read all of them for yourself, but a couple really jumped out at me.
1. It’s easy to learn how to use Twitter, but it’s hard to learn why. Once you get the “why,” you’ll move from skeptic to disciple overnight.
4. Ever think, “If only I could get 5 minutes with Mr. _____, my biz would explode” moments? They’re on Twitter, you’ve got 140 characters. Go!
6. If you fear Twitter will interfere with your ability to get your work done, you’re not afraid of Twitter, you’re afraid of doing your work.
He also said that he thought blogging was the path to instant expertise, which could take six months to a year, but that Twitter is “exponentially faster.”
(Personally, I think six months to a year is a little ambitious to achieve instant expertise in a field. Name recognition and credibility are realistic within that time frame, but instant expertise takes longer.)
I think it’s fair to say that Kevin O’Keefe approaches Twitter from a more practical aspect, namely, its ability to enhance other forms of social media. In fact, he said that social media is more important than search engine optimization (SEO). (For those of you unfamiliar with the term, SEO refers to the design of a web page or the content of a blog so that it is more easily searched and located and given a higher ranking in search results.)
He pointed out that Twitter differs from Facebook in that Twitter users tend to be older, “the kind of people you’d like to have as clients,” where Facebook tends to appeal to younger people.
Kevin described Twitter as the “single biggest branding tool since TV,” and said he would rather go without his cell phone for a week than go without Twitter for a week. Although I’m sure a lot of people would be happy to go without their cell phones and Twitter for a week, if not longer.
In terms of business development, Kevin said that if you want to create a clientele, there’s no better way than to Twitter a trial in your field of expertise. In fact, he mentioned, as had Matt, that a judge had recently allowed the use of Twitter in his courtroom. (For more information on the ruling, Social Media Law Student blog has this post.)
Part of the appeal of Twitter is its simplicity; check out its website, which lets you set up an account in just a couple of steps. I’m not on Facebook, but I understand that its sign-up is more cumbersome, and I know from experience that it takes some time to create a profile on LinkedIn.
Once you have your account, you can find people to follow, i.e., receive their Tweets (Twitter updates) on your Twitter home page or on a mobile device using a program like TwitterBerry for a BlackBerry or Tweetie for iPhone.
Then, it’s just a matter of checking in as little or as much as you want.
The E-Discovery Town Hall presentation yesterday afternoon at LegalTech New York featured questions submitted in advance on YouTube, including one by Cambridge University professor Stephen Hawking. Here are some of the panelists' introductions and some of the questions, although not Professor Hawking's, unfortunately.
The panel was moderated by Patrick Oot, director of electronic discovery and senior litigation counsel for Verizon. The panelists were:
Much of the discussion centered on the costs associated with e-discovery review and production, which can dwarf such costs in conventional, i.e., paper, litigation. Craig Ball suggested that uncertainty drives decision about data collection, which results in unnecessary costs. In other words, if you're not sure what your client will need to produce, you may err on the side of including too much information in your review. He recommended that litigants "push for compulsory collaboration in the data collection process," but that as to evidence preservation issues, "you're on your own."
Craig also recommended the use of special masters. Their advantage is that they are neutral and technologically savvy and can assist in mediating a settlement where e-discovery costs will be substantial, which seems to be nearly any case involving e-discovery.
Also generating discussion was Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26's meet and confer obligations. In response to a question about whether there is any standard checklist for the meet and confer, Ken Withers said there is no 3x5 laminated card you can pull out of your pocket and consult, but that certain basic considerations apply in most every case.
He said that everyone participating in the conference must have a good grasp on his or her client's "data holdings." He also said that too many lawyers treat the meet and confer obligation as perfunctory, which usually has disastrous results, for the lawyers and the client.
Lastly, the presentation mentioned the conflicts that can develop between clients and their counsel. Browning Marean pointed out that lawyers need to know the scope of their client's response to discovery. In e-discovery particularly, where more document review and production can translate into huge sums of money, a client may want to narrow its discovery responses in order to reduce expenses, while its lawyer may view the issue more broadly and recommend -- or insist -- on broader responses. This conflict can also arise between in-house counsel and outside counsel, and needs to be resolved as soon as possible.
By the way, Professor Hawking's question was whether lawyers could rely on key-word searching in document production; the answer, at least according to Craig Ball, is no, unless the lawyer is also a linguist, statistician, or computer scientist.
The presentation will be available at LegalTech on Demand, which can be accessed on LegalTech.
I'm attending LegalTech New York 2009, which started this morning and runs through Wednesday afternoon.
This afternoon I am going to attend two programs: LegalTech E-discovery Town Hall, which will feature an interactive panel of electronic discovery and and legal technology experts who will answer questions submitted in advance via YouTube.
The other one is What is Twitter and How Can I Use it?, which, as the title suggests, will explain the ins and outs of Twitter, including its application to lawyers and clients. I don't Twitter (yet), so I'm very interested in the presentation.
I'll be attending and blogging from the LegalTech New York 2009 seminar in a couple of weeks. The seminar will take place from February 2-4 at the New York Hilton in New York City.
If you're in the area and want to attend a first-class program with interesting speakers and presentations and plenty of exhibitors, then LegalTech New York is for you.
And for those of you out west, LegalTech West Coast 2009 will be held on June 24-25, 2009 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
The Supreme Court of Virginia today held that the unsolicited bulk electronic mail (spam) provision of the Virginia Computer Crimes Act was unconstitutional, and reversed the criminal conviction of Jeremy Jaynes, who had been convicted of sending more than 55,000 emails to AOL subscribers over three occasions in 2003.
In a unanimous opinion in Jaynes v. Commonwealth, Record No. 062388 (no Westlaw cite available yet), the court rejected Jaynes’ claim that the Virginia circuit court did not have jurisdiction over him because he sent the emails from his computer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and had no control over the routers used to send the emails, which were located in Virginia. Because Jaynes selected AOL subscribers as recipients, however, the court found that he knew that sending the emails would use AOL’s servers, and thus came within Virginia's jurisdiction.
But Jaynes fared much better on his challenge to the statute on the grounds that it was overbroad under the First Amendment. There, the court agreed that:
[The Virginia] statute is constitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The court distinguished between Virginia’s statute, which applied to “the transmission of unsolicited bulk electronic [UBE] mail,” and other states’ statutes, which “have restricted such regulation to commercial e-mails.”
Virginia’s statute “is not limited to instances of commercial or fraudulent transmission of e-mail, nor is it restricted to transmission of illegal or otherwise unprotected speech such as pornography or defamation speech. Therefore, viewed under the strict scrutiny standard, [Virginia’s statute] is not narrowly tailored to protect the compelling interests advanced by the Commonwealth.”
Here is a post from The New York Times' Blogrunner, which provides a round-up of blog posts and news articles about the decision.
Tom Ricks is The Washington Post’s military correspondent and the author of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. He writes a weekly column in The Post's Sunday edition called “Tom Ricks’s Inbox,” which, as the name suggests, “aims to give readers a snapshot of the conversations that play out in Ricks's e-mail inbox.”
His column from August 12 was entitled “Ten Lessons the Army Has Taught Me,” and was based on a post from an anonymous blogger at walterreed.blogspot.com about what the Army has taught him. Here are the lessons in summary fashion. But do yourself a favor and read the column, which has an explanation for each one.
1. Always have a notepad, pen, watch, knife, and flashlight on hand.
2. Have a copy of everything. If it’s important, have two copies.
3. Make friends wherever you go.
4. Make an SOP. Know the SOP. Work the SOP.
5. Sleep.
6. Don’t go cheap.
7. Find humor everywhere.
8. Don’t tolerate oppression.
9. Tell your story.
10. Never forget.
Jeffrey V. Mehalic is an attorney in Charleston, West Virginia, and represents both plaintiffs and defendants in civil litigationMore...
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