Shun Web services, you simply can't control the data?


Use Web services only when you have specific, confidentiality and reliability guaranteeing service level agreements?


Use Web services liberally, but acquaint yourself with the applicable terms of use and make sure clients are amenable?

The money quote:

Blogs are not just sites. They are also journals — live ones, to be exact. (Significantly, Brad Fitzpatrick named his blog system LiveJournal.) When you save a blog post, Technorati knows about it and indexes it in as little as 60 seconds or less. I assume Google Blogsearch does the same. Meanwhile Google's main Static Web search engine indexes the entire Web at a less than live pace. This isn't a bad thing at all; just a different thing. This difference is so sharp that Google Blogsearch gives you a choice between "Search Blogs" and "Search the Web".

Money quote:

The reinvented law of reinvented TV is built — route-around by route-around — on the damage of things like byzantine music licensing rules, nonexistent Hollywood film licensing alternatives, antiquated procedural niceties, and the inability of our undeniably glorious (when compared with other alternatives) legal system to deliver certainty on a host of business-critical and livelihood-critical issues.

A must-read.

Law2.0

Nearly every lawyer finds that colleagues, co-counsel, clients and even opposing counsel use the Internet and technology to collaborate and work together on documents, projects and cases. In the simplest scenario, lawyers and clients use the "track changes" feature in Microsoft Word to work together on a document. Technology today lets lawyers take collaboration to the next level. Many legal technology tools now include collaborative elements.

At the same time, lawyers increasingly use the Internet in many ways to work together. From document sharing to videoconferencing, there are more tools than most lawyers can imagine for working together, online.

Two key trends are at play here. First, for years lawyers have understood the clear benefits of collaboration and working together as a routine matter. Second, the availability of simple, inexpensive (even free) collaboration technology has created an environment where working together makes sense to nearly every lawyer in nearly every firm. The push forward on both trends is likely to continue.

Two other important factors also come into play. First, business clients are routinely using technology to collaborate and will expect their lawyers to follow. Therefore, collaboration tools illustrate a classic example of a client-driven technology. Second, events in the world from increased travel costs to possible pandemics make it even more likely that these tools will be adopted by necessity.

To the extent lawyers have experimented with these tools, they may have the nagging feeling that they are simply touching the tip of the iceberg of what might be available to them and how they might use these tools to their benefit. We believe that they are right to feel that way, because it is undoubtedly true.

The book will provide intensely practical advice for lawyers and law firms wanting to take better advantage of these tools and the benefits they bring. It will take a look at how to use these tools wells, focus on both categories of tools and specific individual tools, and provide concrete action steps and techniques so that even the least tech-savvy lawyer can catch up with the early adopters and successful innovators.

Collaboration Tools for Lawyers: Essential New Ways to Work Together with Colleagues, Clients and Even Opposing Counsel, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell (expected publication date: early 2008)

Ken Adams explores the practical potential of using wikis for contract drafting in a piece called "What Are Wikis?" in the New York Law Journal today. Excellent article.

I agree with Ken's conclusion, but I think that the value of wikis will not come through their use as a drafting tool, per se, but as a way to collect the "knowledge" about how contracts are drafted, when you use certain clauses and why, and the like.

Ron and Ross are on top of their games and you'll get some fascinating insights into the ways law firms are using outsourcing and insourcing. We talk about Law 2.0 on this blog on a regular basis and this podcast will give you some practical ideas about what Law 2.0 might mean and what it might look like.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

Then: consider how a virtual law firm (or a very forward thinking conventional one) might be in the perfect position to leapfrog ahead by eliminating the CRM (customer relationship management) line item from its technology and marketing budgets, and instead adopting a client driven, "vendor relationship management" approach to business development.

Wikis at work, BEA, IBM, Oracle, SAP Ramp SOA Spec Efforts: "The group also has setup what they call a 'vendor-neutral Web site, designed as a wiki' they will use to collaborate, communicate and gain feedback from developers. There's a place for news, white papers, public specifications and access to information on early deployments."

Obviously, the Supreme Court doesn't have oral arguments to show people how the court functions. Even a guided tour through the various chambers wouldn't exactly show the public, or lawyers, how the court functions. So, that statement is basically a rah-rah red herring.

Judges, when they talk amongst themselves (and they do this a lot), strongly oppose cameras in the courtroom. But that doesn't mean it's not a good idea. What's going on is judges are doing the cost-benefit analysis in a way that reflects their sensibilities. They realize that a lot of attorneys play to the cameras and to popular sentiment, and they rightly fear that this will diminish the sanctimony of court proceedings.

But, it's not the cameras that cause the problem (i.e. guns don't kill people etc). It's something else: namely our innate desire for attention, which many of us express in really goofball ways. So, yes, having cameras in the courtroom will exacerbate this problem. First question: is there anything that could minimize the problem of attention-hounding lawyers, if and when cameras are allowed in the courtroom? Second, and more important question: what might be the short-term, and long-term benefits of having cameras in the courtroom? I agree it won't exactly show us how the court functions, but it may show us a lot of other useful things. Maybe it will show us how some things don't function as well as they should. Maybe it will allow us to see for ourselves (not filtered through a reporter's descripition) that certain attorneys are ill-prepared or brazen or stellar or [fill-in adjective].

But, regardless of whether we can reach a consensus on whether cameras in the courtroom might be useful, there is something else to consider.

Cameras in the courtroom are inevitable. Why? Because each succeeding generation expects more transparency and openess, especially from government institutions. This has been a long-running and powerful trend. Nationally, and internationally. So when Justice Roberts says that he and his fellow justices see themselves as "trustees of an extremely valuable institution," he is trying to preserve a tradition that over time will lack the resonance that it now has. If you want to receive applause for saying that cameras will never be allowed in the courtroom then make sure you are speaking to other judges. If you say that to other groups of people you'll find the applause is less enthusiastic. Eventually, there will be no applause outside of the judicial sect for this sort of statement.

In 1996, Justice David Souter told a congressional panel, "The day you see a camera come into our courtroom it's going to roll over my dead body." I don't think that will happen in a literal sense, but it actually could if Justice Souter chose to be buried on the steps leading up to the Supreme Court.

Eventually Justice Souter will pass away. This is an inevitability. And it's virtually inevitable that somewhere in the future there will be a generation of people who will expect to be able to see images of what happens in our public courtrooms, especially the United States Supreme Court. Yes, free speech and transparency are messy things that cause all kinds of problems, but they also have tremendous social force. I completely understand Justice Roberts' viewpoint, and to some extent I agree with it. But, regardless of who among us now agrees with it, the truth is that viewpoint has a limited life-span.

I'm not big on fighting things that are inevitable. I'm more inclined to say: so if it's coming, then how can we create a better transition? But then I'm also not someone who gets invited to talk to judicial groups a lot either.

Average citizens are presumed to know the law, which makes it easier for us to punish or fine them. Obviously, we all know that no one could possibly know even a tenth of the law. Meanwhile Congress and various state legislatures spew out new laws the way an out-of-control popcorn machine spits out fluffy white kernels. And when these laws are drafted (in labored verbiage that only a prim bespeckled encyclopedia editor would enjoy dissecting) are they grouped together in coherent categories? No, for the sake of politcial expediency (read: "you scratch my constituents' backs and I'll scratch yours") these laws are mushed together. Yes, let's put that new missle defense treaty in with the funding package for education. That makes perfect sense to me, how about you Bob?

So what can we do about this situation? Sadly, not very much. Let's use a drug analogy just to grab for something far-fetched. When you have a guy who's hooked on heroin there are clear steps you can take: you schedule an intervention and then put him in rehab. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't but at least it's feasible. Our legal system went off the rails at least twenty or thirty years ago, maybe more. But a lot of people (many of them in Washington D.C.) are perfectly comfortable with our legal system. Sure we have problems, but we know exactly what to do when we discover one. Just pass that one more law and glom it together with that other law that Bob just pulled out of the oven. And soon it will all be okay.

Ain't delusion grand?

Ernie points to a recent (and some might call mind-boggling) ruling of a federal judge that requires the opposing attorneys in a case to settle their latest dispute with a game of "rock, paper, scissors."

Ernie does a nice job of explaining the basis point of our court system and concludes, succinctly, that:

Hell, when a federal judge has to tell the attorneys to use a child's game to resolve their disputes then you know the system is completely broken.

I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise, but I completely agree with Ernie. This isn't Law 2.0.

Where do we go from here? What client is going to be happy with this kind of ruling and the behavior that leads to it? Will lawyers chuckle at this and similar stories as they reap the unintended consequences of breaking the court system? If lawyers make a joke of these matters, why should we expect others to take us or the court system seriously? Consider Ernie's comments carefully.

More on the underlying story here.

Then I read the following in the article Denise linked to:

"From the fistful of judges (including Richard Posner) who maintain regular blogs, to the vast and growing number of law professors and law students who find the time to post daily, it's clear that the real bones and guts and sinew of the national conversation is happening online, and not in print."

What, what, what? What about the practicing lawyers with blogs who try on a daily basis to translate legal issues and legal developments into practical explanations and a conversation that we can all understand.

Looks like we have more work to do at the Between Lawyers blog, RethinkIP, Evan Schaeffer's Legal Underground and the many other lawyer and law librarian blogs that are changing the dynamic and the way that the law is discussed today before we get our message out there.

Or maybe the message really is getting out there already. If Marty is getting a million hits a month talking about trademark law, I submit that lawyer bloggers are talking about law in ways that people want to hear it talked about.

Look, I like the law professor blogs and law student blogs, but ultimately what we all really want to find are practical answers to real-word legal questions, issues and problems that face us.

Check out Denise's recent post "Apple v. Does Decision Issued" if you want to see where I think blogging is leading us in the ways we discuss breaking legal developments.

I enjoyed Lithwick's article and agree with her main premise about the value of law-related blogs and what they add to the discussion of legal issues, but I'm surprised by the over-focus on law professor blogs and the invisibilty in the articles of the categories where most of the law-related blogs live.

Interstices are OK for some things, but there are good reasons we called this blog "Between Lawyers" rather than "Jurisprudential Interstices."

What do you think?