The Law and Blawgs Panel is about to begin, featuring our own Ernest Miller as moderator. Our panelists:
And now, on with the show . . .
Ernie is introducing our panelists and talking about the themes of the panel. Weblogs are transforming the way legal information is provided; they're opening up legal information to much wider audiences. Just one example: Howard Bashman caught an error in a 5th Circuit opinion; the judge read his blog and corrected it.
Jenny Levine opens: we don't trust traditional information sources in the same way we used to. Librarians see institutions and information in terms of trust. The blogosphere is built on trust; the next step will be RSS. There, the trust is one layer deeper: you trust a site enough to let your aggregator gather information from it. Thus, the move from Library Science to Library and Informaiton Science, as library schools build these technologies into their training. Now, the library needs to come to you; the big question is "how?"
Westlaw is a great example of "shifted" information. But how do you fill in the gaps? This is a place where librarians come in. Librarians are "connectors". Try to imagine bloggers posting as furiously as they did without the ready information available on the Internet. Blogging helps librarians both gather and disseminate information. Imagine what news aggregation does for librarians. She reads more than 170 sites in her aggregator, a feat she could never do manually. Syndication is an advantage that blogs hold over traditional media.
She hopes that libraries will extend these ideas to reach out to their communities: community libraries building blogging and RSS tools into their institutions. The one big missing piece is mobility: the aggregator is still grounded in a place. Aggregated news on a PDA anywhere is the ultimate in shifting. Librarians can help; they can be a trusted source to provide trusted information.
Denise Howell continues: she first started paying attention to legal weblogs last year; last year, there weren't enough people blogging legal issues for legal professionals It's starting to become staggering how many there are now. She agrees that trust is critical. Weblogs have the opportunity to make "marketing" into a respectable enterprise. That is, weblogs are marketing that actually creates value for the world, and this version of marketing could be quite legitimate.
Weblogs aren't email, and this point gets missed a lot by people who don't yet get the technology (cf. Saddam's censors, as mentioned by Glenn Reynolds, who haven't shut down the Baghdad blogger because they're focused on email). For law firms, a weblog can be a much better way than email or other marketing techniques to impress clients and potential clients, to network, to develop a niche for the firm, and to enhance reputation with colleagues. Administration at any law firm is tightly budgeted, but blogs are cheap. The mantra is "commit no random acts of lunch."
She sends some love LawMeme's way: when people come in and need information, they can turn to a site like LawMeme, where information is categorized, formatted, filtered, and presented in a helpful way. She cites Eric Norland's taxonomy of trust: 1) You are who you say you are, 2) you'll do what you say you'll do, and 3) trust and reputation build over time. All of these factors carry over to weblogging. If people, by reading your blog, can see your expertise in an area, they'll turn to you. And this possible trust can overcome a firm's distrust of just shoving its information out there. See, for example, Goldstein, Howe's SCOTUSBlog, which has really turned a boutique law firm into a national presence by sharing knowledge and displaying their talents.
There is undeniable value to having Google like you. Frequent updates and inbound links make Google bless you. Since people today find lawyers by using online resources, a legal blog is a great resource for lawyers who want to be found. You can really round out your knowledge by having professionals -- e.g. Howard Bashman -- point you to good information sources. Once again, blog-based trust and relationships work to your advantage when you're looking for information.
Donna Wentworth takes the mike next: she spends a lot of time explaining to people what she does and why it matters. Imagine a dinner party, and someone says to Donna, so what is it you do? And she says, I'm the web publications editor for the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, and I write a blog on the politics of intellectual property. And they say, what's a blog? And she says, I don't know.
So, why do blogs work as a tool for education? Especially if, as some argue, blogs are all about the individual ego. Last week, at the Harvard Internet & Society Conference, the question of Harvard's massive intellectual property storehouse arose. They're in the business of selling IP at the Business School: they make cases and they're working on a massive turnkey project, with the goal of making it so that no one ever needs to think about the Internet again. Essentially, they see it as a delivery system for information product.
Oh, how different things are at the law school. They don't see it as a delivery system, for information or for entertainment. Trying to force the Internet to be the perfect delivery system for the RIAA is like draining a Florida swamp to put up an apartment building, only to watch the building slowly sink. The swamp is the natural state of things. So what are the Internet's natural strengths, and what are its natural fuels? Obligatory reference to The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The natural fuel source of blogs -- the human psyche (some say "ego") -- is self-replenishing. See the Open Law project at the Berkman Center, which was an experiment in using an open forum to develop good ideas.
Blogs have a higher calling. She gives a shout-out to Seth's blog as a blog that raised a debate most people didn't realize we needed to have. She give another shout-out to Chilling Effects.
Seth Schoen begins by saying that he traded a book about UNIX for a copy of the The Blue Book. He tells the history of Consensus at Lawyerpoint, which is also the history of the BPDG, which should be well-known to loyal LawMeme readers. He was troubled that people weren't writing about this issue in the mainstream press, perhaps by design. It wasn't really a consensus, it was a negotiation under threat of regulation.
They started to publish drafts that came out of the BPDG and started to get a little bit of press coverage. Even within the DMCA, 1201(k) was a fairly obscure provision, and the details of the issue were quite technical; the conventional wisdom was that most people didn't have the attention span to understand the issue. Blogs are a response, but they faced the problem that they had fewer readers than, say, the New York Times, but technical people were interested . . .
The BPDG was avoiding the general public: no home page, entrance fees, moderate secrecy. Seth went to one session at which an MPAA attorney admitted that he got the documents for the session from the EFF's home page. He kicks over to his personal blog, Vitanuova and tells the story of a briefing given by Microsoft (for which no NDA was signed, since the EFF never signs them), about which Schoen wrote the next day, in terms of Descartes and Plato, followed by a technical description. Which made him realize that there wasn't any real technical information about it on the web. This time, a Microsoft representative said at a panel that the technical spec for Palladium was published at Seth's blog.
Two unconnected stories. First, "BBB" (Bad Bad Blogger, ie, someone who doesn't update for a month). But Consensus at Lawyerpoint is on hiatus, because they're writing a formal comment on the issue right now. And this may be a general problem, because for issue advocacy, there are slow periods when not much is happening.
Also, rules barring participation by journalists. "Public, but no journalists allowed." These policies tend not to be written down; they'd never before had people so skeptical that they wanted the New York Times to want to be allowed in. But since the information wasn't confidential, the EFF would turn around and push it out to the web as soon as it was revealed to them. There was no real definition of a journalist ; the BPDG was unclear on the blog concept. And he suggests that the second panel will turn to these issues.
The EFF uses its blogs for marketing, too: his boss asked him to stop writing about technology on his personal site, not because he was spilling secrets, but because she wanted him to write about technology to draw people to the EFF.
Question:if blogs are marketing, are you using traditional marketing metrics of success (comparing page views to purchases, etc.)? Seth points out that an EFF blog isn't selling anything beside its ideas. The blog is the mission.
Question (Jeff Jarvis)What about control? Once your news is aggregated, you can't control it, or know who's reading the aggregated news. Jenny says that you can tell which of your click-throughs come from aggregators, which is even more valuable than your traditional model. Ernie raises the issue of unfair competition/trademark issues that might arise from deceptive use of aggregated news. Glenn mentions the story of Plastic Bag which didn't want inbound links ("people not clear on the concept," says Glenn). He adds that blogs are especially good as marketing for lawyers because it helps build a sense of personal connection which is critical to the attorney-client relationship.
Rory Perry mentions his work as a judicial officer at the West Virginia Supreme Court, where he's using a weblog as a purely objective news source to deliver important information about cases. Issues of trust are critical to him; it's his state-sponsored job to provide accurate information. You can now use Google as a search engine for West Virginia legal information. It's an easy $40 tool in a tight part of the state budget delivering measurable benefits. He asks whether it's a dream to believe that other courts might get on the bandwagon.
Ernie says that the activism comes from the clerks, people like Rory who know the technology and know the informational guts of the court. The judges may not be leaders, but court officers may be able to drive this opportunity. Academics also have an obligation to be leaders here and to help point the way.