Clifford Law Offices is sponsoring a two-hour continuing legal education program on the hot topic of The Ethics of E-Discovery and Social Media. Two highly experienced and educated instructors will be teaching the free seminar on Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010, from 2:30-4:30pm. It will be offered live in a classroom setting at DePaul University as well as via an interactive webinar. At this time registration is closed. This program has been approved for 2 hours of professional responsibility credit. For questions, email programs@Cliffordlaw.com.
The program is expected to draw a large crowd because so little is known about this area and in light of the new annotated Illinois rules. Most lawyers are familiar with a paper world, but as technology moves forward at a rapid pace, with new technologies creating new scenarios every day for lawyers to face, guidelines and rules must be extrapolated from what currently exists. E-discovery has become a daily part of handling a case. The speakers are well versed in this area of law and will discuss how to handle ethical problems when they arise through hypotheticals that include inadvertently produced privileged or protected information to in-house and outside counsel handling e-discovery.
The advantages of social networking for lawyers are well known – reaching a broad audience virtually from your desk that can be done on a daily basis, but it is not something that lawyers should jump into without some proper precautions and knowledge. An ABA survey found that 15 percent of lawyers were involved in one more social networks in 2008. That number rose to 43 percent in 2009 and continues to rise.