LegalTech, Day 2: Facebook, cloud computing, and more jobs a coming

Facebook Deputy General Counsel Mark Howitson was yesterday’s keynote speaker and he said Facebook is “looking for a fight”.  He said that almost every day, law enforcement officials and civil litigators request information from a user’s Facebook account.  And, he said, there’s some public misunderstanding about what Facebook’s legal responsibilities are to protect user’s privacy.  Howitson said that Facebook is loath to hand over any information on its 350 million users without a subpoena, and even then the company will only provide basic subscriber information unless that user gives his or her consent.   For a good reviews of the speech click here. 

And, as usual, there was a lot to cover at the show.  Our favorite event was a session on cloud computing.  The panel was moderated by Deborah Baron of Autonomy (we’ll have a full interview with her next week) and included Jason R Baron of  the National Archives (who we interviewed last week: click here),  Wayne Matus of Pillsbury, Browning Marean of DLA Piper, Karla Webbe of Bechtel and Brian Weiss of Autonomy.  

The upshot:   in the legal world, the potential risks of cloud computing outweigh the benefits — at least for now.  And the major argument for the further development in using cloud computing?  Money.   Law firms stand to save millions of dollars on research if the same documents can be shared and searched by multiple parties.

There is an excellent review of the panel by Lauren Streib of the Business Insider Law Review blog which you can access here.

And for our background pieces on cloud computing go to our Electronic Discovery Reading Room by clicking here.

We made the rounds of all the vendor booth and we’ll have a tech wrap-up later this week. But we also made alliances with several vendors regarding posting jobs/projects, as well as several more staffing agencies who will be posting jobs on The Posse List so our job postings will continue to pick up this year.  We’ll have announcements next week.  To get on all our job lists click here.

Today, the last day of the show.  The place is already packed for this morning’s keynote address at 9am entitled “I3: The New Convergence of Intelligence, Intuition and Information” which will feature Malcolm Gladwell (author of Outliers, Blink, and The Tipping Point), Dr. Lisa Sanders (New York Times columnist, author of Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis) and David Craig, Chief Strategy Officer, Thomson Reuters.   We’ll have more comment and coverage on “I3” later this year.