Great to see Jeff out on the slopes.

I thought you were going to talk about the problems of running around half-naked. I started watching Survivor because of Mark Burnett and his past production of the Eco-Challenge. I remember watching a race where a team of Navy Seals didn't make it past the first few checkpoints and the finishing teams were near death. Now you've got me started thinking about how Survivor relates to compliance. (And about how Jimmy Johnson will survive without hair product.)

Great pictures. Any idea where they were taken? (It would be great to compare.) The amazing thing about the rain levels and flooding that August is that New England was hit with two hurricanes that month (Connie and Diane).

My biggest concern of my "less kind" review is that MoFo went with an iPhone app instead of merely making their website more friendly for viewing on the iPhone. MoFo.com has a stripped down blackberry view, but not one for the iPhone. I think law firms would be better off making their sites mobile web friendly first, before investing in an app. [Jeff responds: And Doug, on this point, we agree, at least in that I think that a law firm will please more iPhone-using clients and potential clients by a creating a nice iPhone-formatted web page than an app that a client has to download. Having said that, if a law firm is going to do an app, I like what MoFo has done here.]

I think that would have been worse for the bad guys. My wife is better with a gun than me.

Interesting approach, but deeply flawed. Just because I'm not home, it doesn't mean my house is empty. Case in point, my wife was home when I was at the top of Mount Rainier

I think the Post got the Boston law wrong. "http://www.cityofboston.gov/snow/parking: "Any 'spacesavers' left in on-street parking spaces that have been shoveled out must be removed 48 hours after a snow emergency has ended." That just means the DPW will start picking them. There is no legal right to the dug out spot. Just a moral right. And there is common sense. You would be pretty stupid to push that lawnchair out of the way and park in a shoveled out spot. You may come back and find that the lawnchair is back in place, but your car is not.

I think the biggest fallacy is the "young and hip" criteria. Back when I was in the business of rolling out a platform at my old firm, it was the senior people who contributed the most. My theory is that junior people (1) did not know enough about the organization, (2) did not have enough substantive information and (3) were too afraid to publish anything that might show the truth about the first two. Yes, they have much more exposure to the ubiquity of information on the internet, but (like all of use) they have not figured out how this translates to operations inside an enterprise.

Mike - The report was useful to remind FINRA regulated parties that their existing rules apply to social media. Unfortunately, the rules make use of social media very difficult. More so for some platforms than others. This new notice did not change the rules. It provided a few clarifications, but any avid user of social media would find the clarifications rather obvious. Much of the difficulty comes from the inability for the Web 2.0 sites to allow proper archiving of information by user outside of the platform. I'm sure some vendors will step in and hopefully some of the platforms will open themselves for this kind of compliance activity.

Bruce - This reminds me of the bank teller who was fired for chasing a would-be bank robber down the street. http://www.compliancebuilding.com/2009/08/05/fired-for-foiling-a-bank-robbery/ Its clearly the right approach to discourage your employees from getting into a potentially violent situations. In the bank robbery, the lost cash from the bank in insured. At BestBuy, they account for merchandise theft. So the theft is largely meaningless to the company. But in the Starbucks case, that tip money would not have been replaced. That was essentially money out of the barista's pocket. That does make it a different situation with different motivation.

One of the problem with Herrman's argument is that there are more than two blogs among the 100: 3 Geeks and a Law Above and Beyond KM theCorporateCounsel (MoFo's Dave Lynn is an editor) Drug and Device Law SCOTUS Blog That is still under-representative, but not as far off as Herrman would lead us to believe.

Paul - As I die-hard Patriots fan, I agreed with the Belichick decision. (I didn't like the call, but that's a different topic.) What seems to be missing from the discussion of non-hourly billing is that it can be more profitable for the law firm. If you have a million dollar idea, why are you selling it at $500 per hour? Hourly billing is cap on profits. There are only so many hours in the day (at least if the hour is honest) so there is only so much revenue you can generate.

Bruce - I think you need to draw a distinction between the Google Apps version of gmail and the free gmail.com. With Google Apps, you still have your own domain. You just run through the Google email servers instead of your own server. You rent the hardware and software and run in the cloud. You could still be bruce@legalblogwatch and nobody would know that you are using Google Apps. Just like nobody knows if you are using an Exchange server or other email server.

First, I wouldn't ask a lawyer how to create image. (We're sued to wordy definitions.) I think the mistake is going for a stock image of people working on a computer. [Hey use sharepoint 2007 and you get on friend to hang out with; Use the 2010 version and get two new friends.] For collaboration, I'm a fan of this image: http://kmspace.blogspot.com/2008/04/wikis-and-happiness.html

I never liked the old image and the new one is worse. There are three people now instead of two. If SharePoint is so great at collaborating, why are they all standing next to each other? Are they trying to figure out how it works? Or have they given up and are just staring over his shoulder while he edits a document?

David - It was great to run into you again. Glad you liked my session.

I was happy just to have the kid sit still for 30 minutes. That makes me look like a genius. (or a least a genius who was able to squeeze in a shower.)

I did find it interesting that among the social media platforms on which you can follow the project, the ABA's own LegallyMinded was not one of them. Perhaps they have given up on that experiment.

First impressions do matter. Using one of those generic email addresses leaves a bad first impression. Personally, I think the "find a new lawyer" part is a bit extreme but it makes good copy for Esquire magazine. I wonder why Equire left AOL.com from their rule? I added it to my Tweet after a suggestion from a few other people.

I think time sheets are more important, but for a different reason. In hourly billing, the time records go to the client to justify the bill. When you go to non-hourly billing, the time sheets are focused on the internal process and business analysis. You can focus on the efficiencies and inefficiencies of your operations. You can use this data to better target your fee and find ways to get it done better, faster and more efficiently. Putting more money in the lawyer's pocket. You need to remember that hourly billing is also a cap on profitability. You can only work so many hours in a day.

Records management has been become a huge problem as more and more information ends up electronic with seemingly endless storage to absorb it. Computer memory has gotten much cheaper than the real estate cost of storing paper. Paper is paper, but electronic storage keeps getting harder as the electronic medium keeps evolving. Email is pretty straight-forward these days. Now we have to figure out the best way to deal with blogs, wikis and 2.0 tools as they start growing in the enterprise. Then add on cloud computing and it gets harder and harder.

They may not be very useful, but you cannot ignore them. For most firms, the Wikipedia entry comes up in the top ten for search results. So, at a minimum, you need to make sure the Wikipedia entry is not vandalized and the information remains truthful (if still sparse.)

It was not a surprising result. The attorney should have tried to make the friend request themselves first. I also want to point out the original source of the post (before it got syndicated out to Social media Today) on my blog, Compliance Building: http://www.compliancebuilding.com/2009/05/04/ethics-and-facebook/

(For full disclosure, I work for a private investment fund company.) Like you, I keep hearing that private funds need to be regulated. I just have not heard the justification for why. I certainly have not heard how the regulations will benefit the investing public. As you point out, the registration regulation required by the SEC did little to stop Madoff. Perhaps requiring a third party custodian and independent audits would help prevent some fraud. But I have not heard sensible things like this mentioned in the proposed new regulations.

Although imperfect, I liked the analogy to a videographer: "The videographer does not have to ask to enter a private area to make the video. If he did, then similar issues would be confronted, as for example, if the videographer took a hidden camera and gained access to the inside of a house to make a video by presenting himself as a utility worker." Facebook and MySpace are semi-private, so the user control access to the information. I found the fatal flaw to be that the attorney requesting the opinion did not request access to the facebook of myspace profile. He or she assumed that the witness would deny access. That assumption degrades the attorney's argument and paints the information as being private.