the executive summary:

Nutshell: if you’re a law firm considering hiring me, and you stumble across this blog, please don’t get nervous. Instead, talk to me, and/or read the rest of this post. I’m eager to explain why I blog, and why I think it may make me a better lawyer and a good addition to your firm.

[Image by Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void fame; used with permission under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 1.0 license. For more on why Hugh licenses his images this way, see here.]

the full story:

Why are you writing this post now, about this topic?

Yesterday I finally got the interview question I’d been dreading/looking forward to: “So, you have a blog…” The interview was a little rushed, so we didn’t get to discuss it much, but they seemed to think it was interesting and a potential positive.

Not all firms who find this blog are going to be so forward-thinking, of course, and some will be legitimately nervous about finding that a candidate is so far outside the expected norm. I thought I’d write this Q&A to demystify the blog and explain why it shouldn’t worry (and might even excite) them.

What is a Q&A, anyway?

A Q&A is a blog post format I borrowed from my friend Steven O’Grady, an analyst at Redmonk. Basically, it is exactly what it says it is on the label- a question and answer format. I’ve found that it can be a useful way of clearly communicating information when you anticipate a lot of questions about a specific issue- which is exactly the situation here.

So why do you blog?

There are a lot of reasons, some of which are more important than others on any given day. Among them:

• I want to follow the advice that I gave the Wall Street Journal: the best way to control your online identity is to create positive information about yourself. (It works- not only is this blog the top search result for my full name, it was for a long time the first search result for “luis”.)
• When I started blogging, it was an important part of my job description; it helped me communicate with partners and with the volunteers who I used to coordinate. This is no longer true, of course, but once you’re in the habit it is hard to break.
• I have lots of friends scattered all over the world who read blogs, and so my blog is an easy way to keep them up to date on my life. (And even my mom reads it now. Dad is still resisting.)
• I like writing in an informal but coherent manner, and getting a chance to clarify and discipline my thoughts by writing about them. I didn’t get much chance to do that in my prior life as a programmer and manager, and I certainly don’t get much of a chance to do that in law school, so this is an outlet.
• Frankly, because occasionally other people post things like this. It never hurts to have your ego boosted from time to time, and blogging gives other people the opportunity to do that ;)

What do you blog about?

A mix of things- some technology, some law, some in the overlap of law and technology, and quite a bit of personal information- anecdotes about concerts I’ve been to, that sort of thing.

Who reads it?

My logs suggest that about fifteen to twenty thousand people read the average post on my blog. While I can’t know for certain who they all are, and the numbers are imperfect, most of them are probably technologists and engineers of various stripes who are familiar with my work in a previous life, and who remain interested in my experience as a technologist moving into a new field, as well as my occasional digressions back into technology. Most of these probably don’t read the blog directly, but rather through various news sites (called ‘planets‘) which I’m syndicated onto.

A smaller number are classmates and other law students (some posts are syndicated into facebook), and at least a handful are practicing lawyers who specialize in technology issues. (At least one GC of a very large technology company has emailed me thanking me for my posts on the new General Public License and letting me know that he’d circulated them to his executive team.)

How do you find the time?

Once you’re in the habit, you can make time. It doesn’t always happen, of course- I’m sure an analysis of my posts over the past year would show that they dropped to nearly nothing during exams. But even then I can sneak in the occasional mental health post, and you’d be surprised how much you can write between 2 and 3am (most of this post, for example.)

Do you think you’ll find the time to continue once you enter the legal industry?

Now that is a very good question. I’m really not sure. I’d like to, because I’d like to think that some of my readers will be starting their own companies in the future and hence they’ll be future potential clients, and (obviously) because I enjoy doing it.

But I’m also a realist- the first few years at a firm, even more so than law school, have a reputation for stripping away your spare time. As one interviewer told me the other day, ‘when I get home, the only technology I want to use is my remote control.’ So… ‘maybe.’

It may also continue as a very different beast than it is now- probably more constrained in the topics covered (because of confidentiality and conflicts) and perhaps more constrained in the volume I can write.

Are you crazy? Lawyers don’t blog!

I don’t think I’m too crazy- lots of tech lawyers are blogging these days, so it isn’t completely unusual like it might have been even a few years ago. Certainly some of the lawyers whose careers I’d most like to emulate (like Mark Radcliffe of DLA Piper and Mike Dillon of Sun Microsystems) are now starting to do it, albeit in low volume. Of course they have the advantage of being very established and very senior, which I obviously don’t, but I’m working on that :)

Aren’t you scared that you’ll say something that will offend someone, and it will cost you a job or otherwise jeopardize your well-being?

Frankly? Yes, a little bit. As a result, I know I’ve self-censored some posts since I started school, and there are other posts which I did not self-censor, but that I constantly worry I should have. On the whole, though, I think the benefits outweigh the risks- I’m not exactly a radical in most senses of the word, so the risks aren’t too high, and I hope that most firms will look at my resume and realize that I’m a professional, and know how to constrain and modify my behavior when necessary. If the firm is so risk averse that it still troubles them, well, then, we should talk.

On the whole, are you glad you blog?

Absolutely. It isn’t a magical cure-all, and it might not be something I always have the option of doing, but I enjoy it right now, and I hope it is something that I’ll be able to continue to use to enrich my private and professional life for a long time.

[I'm going to leave this pegged to the top of my blog until interview/offer season is over; apologies to anyone who reads the blog the normal way for having to skip over it to get to my regular posts.]

• School is generally good; the first two years ended up being very successful (low honors first year; high honors last year.) This year I planned to throttle back to have more time for outside projects, so I am taking fewer credits than ever. Unfortunately, I seem to have chosen those credits poorly so I am doing more work than ever. Hence, not much time for outside projects :/
• Will spend the summer studying for the bar; location TBD (since Columbia throws me out of housing a few days after graduation.) Yes, the bar is hard. Not that hard- Columbia alums pass the California bar at a 90+% rate. But obviously no one wants to be in that 6-8% so of course everyone studies like crazy. That will be me.
• Have accepted a job at Orrick Herrington Sutcliffe starting early fall ‘09 in their Silicon Valley office. I look forward to it- excellent firm, excellent people, probably will not implode in the next year. :) Current plan is to work about 50-50 on startups and technology licensing, but obviously the economy may dictate a different balance. Silver lining of the economy may be more time for pro bono projects, of which I obviously have a long list I’d like to work on.
• Am not getting married at GUADEC. ;) Probably a low-key family-only affair followed by big, fun parties in Miami and Boston (or New York?)
• Krissa and I are trying to enjoy NY as much as possible before leaving, which includes lots of live performances (Jazz at Lincoln Center, ‘In The Heights’, Deblois, Nutcracker), lots of eating (Caracas Arepas, dinner at a not-so-expensive place with Steve Martin and a guy who looked a lot like Paul Simon at the next table), and lots of family visits and East Coast travel (I’m in week two of a six week stretch with family or travel every weekend- all four-plus parents, Summit, and a lecture at Duke.)
• Krissa is good- loving her job still; enjoying NY; looking forward to going home to California. Currently in Turkey biking with her mom, else she’d have been in Boston and in Durham next weekend.

So yeah, life is good. Crazy, but good. Not sure I’d have it any other way.

Apologies to everyone who I said I’d see this morning at Summit; unfortunately I had to change my train to a pretty early train and overslept, so pretty much ran from hotel to train. Next year…

Key take-away: the campaign is trusting volunteers to take roles that would never have given to volunteers in the past, and using new communications technology (and training) to help coordinate them. Result: vastly increased reach and increased levels of participation and ownership. Parallels to self-organizing (potentially fragile?) open peer production communities will be self-evident to anyone who has participated in one of those. Money quote: “Movements aren’t built on individual people—they are built on relationships.”

My first post at FTK is on a topic that got interesting to me after I saw Clay Shirky speak at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference: Political Information Overload and the New Filtering. In a nutshell, I look at some of the new filtering mechanisms that are (or aren’t) helping us deal with the deluge of political information- information that was always being created, but is only now being distributed so widely that it feels overwhelming. Sadly, I’ve got no great insight, but I think it is an area that deserves more thought and design instead of the ad hoc evolution that is creating it right now.

Relatedly: (added later): similar long-term numbers for server market share, both by OS and by chip family (x86 v. everyone else, primarily) would be terrific to have if anyone knows of a source of them (ideally without paying Gartner bazillions, though I really need to look into whether or not the school’s Bloomberg subscription gives me access to that.)

It’s not that I don’t trust Google, but the Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V explanation .. seems like an odd oversight for a product in secret, heavy development for close to two years.

Explaining why it isn’t that odd might give people a little better understanding about how corporate lawyers work, and maybe even what this does (and doesn’t) teach us about Google and privacy.

First thing this teaches us: Lawyers (like programmers) copy and paste whenever they can. On the plus side, a document that is copied is usually battle-tested- so you know you’re getting something that covers all the bases, generally does the right thing, and has no known errors. If you wrote it from scratch, you might forget or overlook something, and that would be a problem. And lawyers are expensive- so if the copy and paste saves them time, it saves you money. On the down side, a copied and pasted document sometimes doesn’t fit the new situation perfectly; for example, old language could take on new meaning when the software grows new functionality- which appears to be what bit Google here. Given lawyers’ love of ctl+c and ctl+v, this doesn’t seem that odd.

(Corporate lawyers in particular are notorious for copying and pasting, to the point that some venture capital groups provide their own legal documents, since they figure your lawyers are going to be copy and pasting anyway.)

Second thing this teaches us: lawyers are human too. Your eyes glaze over after reading just one of these EULAs, and corporate lawyers who work in this area can easily read hundreds of these, all very, very similar. This doesn’t excuse the mistake that happened here- lawyers are well paid to avoid exactly this kind of problem. But at the end of the day we’re only human- after reading the same phrases a thousand times, it isn’t too ‘odd’ that sometimes we miss the wrinkle that gives the same old sentence an entirely different meaning like it did here.

Third thing this teaches us: among lawyers, programmers are notorious for doing things first and asking the lawyers to check it over later, even the night before (or the day after!) the release. I have no idea if that is what happened here- it could well be that the lawyers were consulted from day one, and Google generally seems well-organized about this sort of thing. But it is quite possible that even in a two year project like this one the lawyers were called only weeks, days, or hours before the website went live- obviously increasing the odds of a mistake like this one. Again, lawyers are well paid to do things under pressure- so this shouldn’t have happened- but it isn’t too surprising.

What this doesn’t do is teach us much about Google, Chrome, and privacy.

First, we still don’t have a great idea what other privacy problems there are with Chrome. Google may no longer be claiming to own everything you publish on the web, but there is still a lot of data going from you to them, and I for one still haven’t seen a good analysis of that.

Second, some people have claimed that this shows us that when there is a public outcry, Google will respond, and therefore there is no need for government privacy regulation. I’m not convinced government privacy regulation is a good idea, and Google may well be very responsive to market forces. But the idea that this incident shows that Google reacts to the market is fairly ludicrous- remember, what we’re talking about here is correcting a copy and paste error. So, yes, we’ve proven that when a Google lawyer accidentally gives them the ability to do something they have no intention to do, they’ll fix the lawyer’s accident. But this tells us nothing about how they’ll respond when they actually consciously choose to collect data- they famously did nothing when there were huge complaints gmail and privacy, and their response when people actually take them to court seems to be that “complete privacy does not exist.”

So was this mistake odd? Not really. But it tells us a lot more about how lawyers work than it tells us about Google, Chrome, and privacy.

This isn’t really their fault; as far as I know no one has creatively addressed their needs¹. Still, frustrating to see. If only there were 30 hours in the day…

1. just as no one has creatively addressed the need of the spec writers