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New York's Appellate Division adopted new rules prohibiting certain types of attorney advertising and solicitation, which were to take effect February 1, 2007. The new rules barred testimonials from clients relating to pending matters, portrayals of judges or fictitious law firms, attention-getting techniques unrelated to attorney competence, and trade names or nicknames that imply an ability to get results. The amendments also established a thirty-day moratorium for targeted solicitation following a specific incident, including targeted ads on television or in other media. A New York attorney, along with his law firm and a not-for-profit public interest organization, challenged these provisions as violating the First Amendment. The United States District Court for the Northern District of New York held that the rules were unconstitutional except for the 30 day moratorium for targeted solicitation, 634 F.Supp.2d 239, and the parties appealed. Last month the Second Circui

There I was in the train station, reading the newspaper while waiting for my train, when I heard a man in a loud voice say Representative. I turned to see a man using a pay phone and empathized with his plight to get a live person on the other end of the line. But then the man stated and spelled his name for the representative, said he was going to give his social security number and then did so in its entirety, and finally blurted out his date of birth. Can anybody say identity theft? Yet none of it seemed to phase the man, who was just trying to obtain information about how certain stocks were doing in the market that day. In todays world, people are concerned about the misappropriation of information they provide electronically. So it was hard to believe that the man, who I later heard state that he was a lawyer, would voluntarily broadcast his personal information. The concern to protect the privacy of personal information from falling into th

The New York State Bar Association (NYSBA) had its annual meeting in New York City this week. For the past number of years the meeting has featured a Presidential Summit at which the Bar President chooses hot topics of the day for a distinguished panel to discuss. This years topics were wrongful convictions and attorneys use of social media, which centered mostly upon issues of privacy and the internet. I was fortunate this year to be able to attend the Presidential Summit for the first time, and it was well worth the time (I shouldnt say it was well worth the price of admission because attendance was complimentary to meeting registrants). Social media was the first topic discussed. Most surprising was that in the context of using social media and the internet in general, the normally dry topic of ethics becomes not only somewhat interesting, but also something that if ignored can lead to some real headaches. For example, although using Facebook and Twitter can

Florida's Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee has ruled that judges should no longer "friend" on Facebook lawyers who appear before them. The committee ruled that online "friendships" could create the impression that lawyers are in a special position to influence their judge friends. The committee did conclude that a judge can post comments on another judge's site and that during judicial elections, a judge's campaign can have "fans" that include lawyers. Social networking sites such as Facebook were found to be troublesome because the judge selects the lawyer as a part of the group, and has the right to approve or reject the lawyer's being listed in the group. The ruling does not single out Facebook. It applies to any social networking site which requires the member of the site to approve the listing of a friend or contact on the member's site if: (1) that person is a lawyer who appears before the judge, and (2) identification of the lawyer as the judge

The woman accused of using MySpace to bully a vulnerable teenage girl who subsequently killed herself has been found guilty of three misdemeanor charges. Lori Drew created a fake MySpace profile in the name of Josh Evans and used the persona to flirt with a thirteen year old girl named Megan Meier, who her daughter had previously fallen out with. After weeks of flirting Drew then sent her message which said: "Youre a shitty person, and the world would be a better place without you in it." About 20 minutes later, Tina Meier found her daughter hanging from her belt in her bedroom closet. She died at the hospital the next day.

This is cool! Google Transit, a feature of the Google Maps online mapping service, provides point-to-point public transit trip planning. Google Transit will now allow travelers to access streamlined, regional trip-planning based on up-to-date schedule data across the subway, bus and rail systems, including walking directions for the beginning or end of the trip. The new service will include transit services throughout the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) service territory including: New York City Transit, Long Island Rail Road, Metro-North Railroad, MTA Bus, Long Island Bus and Staten Island Railway, as well as other regional connecting services participating in the initiative, such as New Jersey Transit, the Port Authoritys AirTrain and Staten Island Ferry. But one wonders what information about its customers (and potential plaintiffs) the MTA (or its subsidiaries) will be able to glean from customers' use of Google Transit. For example, it has become co

Advocates for children are upset that Alloy Media and Marketing has run ads for prescription drugs from its Channel One website. Channel One provides free news and original programming to about 10,000 middle and high schools. Channel One is, in the opinion of many, a controversial in-school news program that makes viewing ads a compulsory part of the school day for grades six through twelve. One of Channel Ones drug ads links to Acneheroes.com, a kid-targeted website created by the pharmaceutical company sanofi-aventis to promote BenzaClin, a prescription drug for acne. The website features actor Cody Linley, who introduces himself as one of the stars of Hannah Montana, which airs on the Disney channel and is among the most popular television programs for children. As part of its user agreement with schools, Channel One has pledged not to market prescription drugs to its young audience. Yet ads for the prescription acne medications Differin and BenzaClin ran on the Cha

Every online picture has a unique "Hash Value" that, once identified and collected, can be used to digitally match the same image anywhere else it is distributed. It is analagous to a fingerprint. As part of an undercover investigation, the New York State Attorney General's office built a library of the Hash Values for images identified as being child pornography, enabling investigators to filter through tens of thousands of online files at a time, speedily identifying which Internet Service Providers were providing access to child pornography images. This led to five of the world's largest Internet Service Providers ("ISPs"), AT&T, AOL, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint to reach an agreement with the New York State Attorney General's office to shut down major sources of online child pornography. For the first time, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint have agreed to block access to child porn from two significant sources. The companies will eliminate acces

Ensuring that every American has access to broadband throughout the country has been declared to be an essential health care imperative by the Joint Advisory Committee on Communications Capabilities of Emergency Medical and Public Health Care Facilities in a recently released report. The Joint Advisory Committee was established pursuant to legislation Congress passed in 2007 to implement the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission. The Committee found that home broadband can enable access to distant telemedicine applications, remote monitoring technologies, health information, and the ability of health care workers to work remotely in an emergency. Broadband communications systems can help ensure that each patient receives the most appropriate care, at the optimal location, with the minimum delay. Telemedicine is the use of medical information exchanged from one site to another via electronic communications to improve patients' health status. It has been in existence in v

Google has announced a pilot project called Google Health in which it will begin storing the medical records of 1,500 to 10,000 patients at the Cleveland Clinic who agreed to an electronic transfer of their personal health records so they can be retrieved through Google's service, which will not be open to the general public. Each health profile, including information about prescriptions, allergies and medical histories, will be protected by a password. Last year Microsoft introduced a similar service, HealthVault, and AOL co-founder Steve Case founded Revolution Health, which also offers online tools for managing personal health histories. The project concerns privacy watchdogs who think Google already knows too much about the interests and habits of its users as its computers log their search requests and store their e-mail discussions. For example, Google, through Google Analytics, Google Checkout, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Calendar, and Google Books, knows what we l