Unprecedented

This week on Law.com's Unprecedented podcast we talk with Nathan Wessler, a staff attorney with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. Wessler will be arguing against the Department of Justice on Wednesday at the U.S. Supreme Court in Carpenter v. U.S.

This week on Law.com's Unprecedented podcast we talk with Riana Pfefferkorn, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School focusing on cryptography.

This week on the Law.com Unprecedented podcast, we hear from Gillian Hadfield, a professor at the University of Southern California's Gould School of Law and author of Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy.

Duration: 00:25:36

This week on Law.com's Unprecedented podcast, we hear from James Lee, CEO and co-founder of legal AI startup LegalMation. Lee, also a litigator and managing partner at LTL Attorneys in Los Angeles, talks about the potential and limitations of applying artificial intelligence to litigation. And he offers predictions for how being a lawyer will change once tasks like answering a complaint or writing an interrogatory are automated.

Duration: 44:45

For an institution that is supposed to appear at all times above the fray, it can get tricky when members of the judiciary decide to accept a Facebook friend request or even just retweet a news article. A set of federal and state appellate court decisions over the summer offered some guidance on what's allowable for judges when it comes to social media, but a lot is still murky. This week on Unprecedented, we explore the ethical boundaries for the bench online, as well as what judges are telling lawyers about social media behavior.

"For judges, this area has really just exploded, in part because of the role that politics plays in many states -- 39 states elect their judges in some kind of partisan election," says guest John Browning, an attorney at Passman Jones in Dallas who has written at length about the issue. Multiple states have dealt with whether judges "liking" a fellow judge's campaign Facebook site is an impermissible endorsement. Some judges don't even realize what they're sharing with the world. "We have, in some sense, judges with a lack of understanding of how it works."

Duration: 39:31

When Eric Goldman started practicing law, the Internet was a different place from the one we know today: a world of dial-up bulletin boards and web precursors like "Usenet" and "Gopher." The legal aspects of cyberspace were murky at best. "I joined the Cooley Godward firm in Palo Alto in 1994 and I told them I wanted to do Internet law," recalls Goldman, now a professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law and prominent technology law blogger. "And they said, 'That sounds great. If we have any Internet law stuff, we'll let you know."

Since then, Goldman has chronicled how the law has coped with the modern Internet, using his academic perch to try and make sense of a chaotic space. In this episode of Unprecedented, Goldman talks about one of the biggest legal flashpoints for Internet companies — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — and asks how courts will know when a smiley face emoji really means something more.

Duration: 22:08

The legal profession is hardly immune to the changes being wrought by technology. And Stanford University's CodeX Center—a partnership between its law school and computer science department—has been a significant contributor to those changes in recent years as an incubator for legal tech startups. Among the companies that have roots at CodeX are Bay Area legal analytics firms Lex Machina and Ravel Law.

CodeX also has tried to give lawyers and other industry professionals a glimpse over the horizon with its annual "FutureLaw" conference. If there was an overriding theme at this year's event on April 6, it was that the current law firm model is unsustainable and isn't serving the needs of clients or society generally. University of Southern California Law Professor Gillian Hadfield, in a keynote, said that one survey of large company general counsels showed 70 percent would not recommend their primary law firm and that 80 percent are reducing the work they send out.

RELATED ARTICLE: Bigger Data, 'Tech Terror' and Diversity Disparities Mark CodeEx's Fifth FutureLaw

In this podcast, we take you inside the FutureLaw conference to hear from some of the speakers and attendees about how technologies like legal data analytics are evolving, how law firms can make themselves more efficient by embracing them, and what the limitations are. It's not all doom and gloom. "I don't think that the law firm or the lawyer will go away, that they will be completely disrupted and there will only be robo-lawyers," said Roland Vogl, executive director of CodeX. "I think a lot of those technologies that we're talking about are lawyer-enhancing."

Duration: 28:36

Attorneys trying to keep up with the legal landscape surrounding transfers of data between the United States and the European Union have had their work cut out for them the last few years. First, the U.S.-EU "Safe Harbor" framework was scrapped by the EU high court. Just as that was being patched up with the "Privacy Shield," another court action in Ireland has threatened an alternative legal tool permitting transatlantic data flows. Plus, let's not forget the gorilla in the room — the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — which will overhaul the entire legal framework for data privacy in Europe when it comes into force next year.

In this episode of Unprecedented, veteran cybersecurity and data privacy attorney Françoise Gilbert of Greenberg Traurig's Palo Alto office gives us a look ahead at the challenges facing companies and lawyers in this space. She explains why she's not so worried about the Irish High Court case, predicts that the Privacy Shield will probably hold, while warning that the GDPR could lead to increased enforcement and litigation risk for companies. "I would predict that every country, especially the larger ones that have a larger staff, will have more enforcement actions and be more stringent than they were in the past," she says.

Listen to the full podcast below.

Duration: 22:50

The Internet of Things has a certain allure. You can set your home at just the right temperature, or ask Alexa about the First Amendment. But if there was one takeaway from the Mirai botnet debacle that weaponized over a million internet cameras, it was this: a lot of these devices have serious security flaws. And those flaws, naturally, have opened the door to lawsuits.

In this episode of Unprecedented, we talk with two people about where this issue is headed: Wiley Rein partner Megan Brown, who advises companies on cybersecurity litigation and regulatory issues in Washington, and Stanford University assistant computer science professor Keith Winstein, who is participating in the Secure Internet of Things Project.

Brown contends that litigation will only hamper efforts to make devices more secure. "You may create a perverse incentive that tells companies don't talk about their vulnerabilities and don't share information about this because you're just going to get sued down the road," she says.

Meanwhile, Winstein explains that the reason so many of these devices are weak in the first place boils down to both how their software is developed and raw dollars-and-cents. "Some of these internet of things devices, they don't cost $500, they cost more like $5. And so the economic model might not be there for someone to keep preparing fixes for any length of time."