COURSE DESCRIPTION
The Internet is the uniform information appliance for communications, research, and marketing, for consumers and for lawyers. You can easily research witnesses, parties, judges, and jurors with a simple Google search. Add in social media searches – blogs, Facebook, Twitter and many other platforms – and you can develop a rich demographic profile of all of these individuals. With a few keystrokes, you can pull down more information than ever before. You can also communicate freely, unmediated and unrestricted, with virtually anyone. All of these functions are valuable in litigation and transactional practice but also give rise to substantial ethics issues – not everything that the Web enables is proper. This program will provide you with a real world guide to ethics issues when lawyer engage in research and communication using the Internet.
- Communicating with parties, opposing attorneys, and witnesses via email, social media, and texting
- Researching jurors, parties, witnesses and judges via social media
- Blogging or sending newsletters/law updates to clients
- Trends in texting, confidentiality, and discoverability
- Law firm marketing via the web
Speaker:
Thomas E. Spahn is a partner in the McLean, Virginia office of McGuireWoods, LLP, where he has a substantial practice advising clients on properly creating and preserving the attorney-client privilege and work product protections. For more than 30 years he has lectured extensively on legal ethics and professionalism and has written “The Attorney-Client Privilege and the Work Product Doctrine: A Practitioner’s Guide,” a 750 page treatise published by the Virginia Law Foundation. Mr. Spahn has served as a member of the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility and as a member of the Virginia State Bar's Legal Ethics Committee.