If they'd have asked me (or perhaps 95% of the over 1,000 people who have voted in the Volokh Conspiracy poll), I'd have told them the last thing they should be doing is invoking the DMCA. Instead I'd have recommended:

• applying an appropriately liberal Creative Commons license,


• holding a mashup contest, and


• showcasing the winner and the top 9 runners up on the firm's home page.

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?

#1 know and follow bar association guidelines for conduct, as well as the rules of good legal writing. no need to use Blue Book citations, but be accurate in your posts: others will look to them as a source of information and news, if not actual research.

#2 be mindful of what you write. remember that you have an audience.

#3 identify yourself and write in first person. make it clear that you are not necessarily speaking for the bar association as a whole. be sure to disclose any information necessary to keep your statements from being misleading. use the following disclaimer on your blog or wiki with respect to all posts:

#4 respect copyright and fair use. do not plagiarize. give credit where due by citing to the author of a statement or passage.

#5 do not reveal confidential information that could result in liability to yourself, your committee, other bar association members, or the bar association itself.

#6 do not comment on active cases or client matters by name except with the approval of those referred to in the post.

#7 do not use ethnic slurs, insults, or obscenity. Avoid writing about inflammatory topics solely to pique prurient interests.

#8 always try to add to a discussion constructively and ultimately to add value. do not let your ego get in the way. you are here for the good of the bar association after all.

#9 have fun. a blog or wiki can be loads of fun and a terrific way to share the best of your committee with the world.

• a flawed business model;
• a flawed financial focus; and
• flawed human resource strategies.

(Via Genie Tyburski) The world's hothouses are incapable of housing enough fresh lobby flowers to make it ok to let these kinds of issues fester.

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."

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz: "Our blogging policy is 'Be authentic. Period.'" (It's been awhile since I was showing up bright eyed and bushy tailed for Larry Sonsini's Securities Regs class in law school, but I'd be willing to bet Sun's securities lawyers might want a qualifier or two.)

Summer camps, with camper identities to protect and other considerations, might understandably go a different route. That article also highlights, and Dennis pointed out (by pointing here) on our mailing list, the camps' attempts to police bloggy uses of their trademarks. I'll have to defer to Marty on this but what they're concerned about sounds like nominative fair use.

1. Blog. I suspect that companies pursuing their own blogging initiatives in addition to implementing policies intended to cover unsanctioned employee blogs will run into fewer problems with employee mistakes or misunderstandings. This is because the management and culture throughout the organization is bound to better grasp the process and related security and compliance issues. IMO, the best "training" occurs by example and widespread use.
2. Breathe. As I've pontificated here before, there's a pretty good case to be made that blogs and their ilk are actually the least risky form of corporate communication. If a company adequately gets across the reasons it expects certain employee conduct with regard to external communications, confidential information, and technology use, blogs, etc. are at least as "safe" as email and the phone; in fact, because people are more likely to understand up front these technologies are designed to accomplish wide and persistent information distribution, people are more likely to approach their use with caution and respect.
3. Mix. Organizations need to make sure their P.R./marketing and legal arms are communicating about how employees should be relaying work related information to third parties or the world at large, and they need to have an open-eyed appreciation of all the ways people might be or are using technology to do so. Brace yourself: P.R. and legal goals just might compete. Management needs to understand those conflicts and decide what resolution best fits what they're trying to accomplish (and what the law insists they accomplish).

The money quote:

"Billing for your time is like clubbing your next meal. And the time sheet is a modern version of drawing a picture of the hunt on your wall.

Clients are interested in buying results, not your time."

Food for thought.

As Tom explains, lawyers in mid-sized firms (and also in more larger firms than people might expect) are consistently working annd billing more hours than associates. There is no "leverage" and in many mid-sized firms the partner/associate ratio is 1:1 (or less).

What has happened, especially since the notion of minimum billable hours got applied to partners, is that partners hoard work and do not delegate it to associates. The reasons are pretty clear - if your compensation and review is based on making your own quota of billable hours as a partner, then, even though you are defeating the basic economic purpose of having a firm and using leverage with associates, you will make sure that you have sufficient work to make your own billables quota first. In firms that use "billed" or "collected" hours as a measure, the tendency to hoard is even greater.

Tom's post does an excellent job of describing the phenomenon and explaining the many negative consequences that flow from it. Tom's suggestion of a more rational compensation scheme for mid-sized firms is mandatory reading, especially if you are a parther (or a partner-to-be) in a mid-sized firm.

My own take on this is that the work-hoarding partner phenomenon is one of the most insidiously destructive forces at work in law firms today. If you ask senior associates and young partners why they have left firms, it is rare not to hear some variation on this theme.

I applaud Tom for asking the questions and proposing a starting point for finding a solution.

The money quote:

The firm gets a bonus out of the new approach. The firm gains a farm team out of which the future partners and leaders of the firm will come.

It should concern us that Tom has to remind us of the basic truths he notes in his post. More firms, however, should be concerned that the farm team has already left the ranch.