John Palfrey

You can now learn more than ever before about the inner workings of Google and why their IPO ought to raise $2.7 bn. in their S-1 (via findlaw).  Readers be warned: it’s 171 pages.  Lawyers be warned: it includes such unlawyerly statements as “Don’t be evil.”  Wondering who has how much stock?  See p. 84.  The BBC has context, via Dave.  And Forbes has a businessperson’s take.

The best part of this story: Google’s looking at going for an Open IPO.  It’s been tried, small-time, but cool but tiny companies like Peet’s Coffee and Tea, with some success.  But Google is the show, and will put the idea to the real test.  It means that ordinary people can bid for the shares before they hit the after-market, not just big clients of the underwriters and other insiders.  Save your pennies.

When lawyers first discovered the Net, there was all kinds of talk about how it would transform the practice, and perhaps even the profession itself.  Surely the Net has wrought major changes in terms of efficiency gains, how transactions take place, how disputes (might be) resolved, the nature and extent of evidence, how trials are conducted, and many other ways. 

I’ve noticed recently that some of the sites that provide legal information online have begun to take major steps forward in terms of usefulness.  Of course, the biggies — Lexis and Westlaw — have been online for some time now, and the use of hypertext links in the cases and articles and other information makes a huge difference.  Cornell’s LII provides an astonishingly impressive, and quickly updated, store of US statutes and related information (other law schools have good reason to be jealous of this resource!).  What has yet to be solved, though, is the definitive resource for a solo practitioner or small firm that needs a way to sort through information of varying qualities online. 

Some of the original legal websites — Nolo (mostly tries to sell you books and software, with some helpful FAQs on big topics), findlaw (run by some very clever people, provides a lot of links to a lot of places, and has some good cases uploaded), and gigalaw (great, original content on Internet law and related matters, with some useful primers on commonly-discussed but poorly understood topics like copyright) – each provide some very helpful information on specific topics and have gotten a lot more useful over the past few years.  A small company in Massachusetts called LeapLaw, founded by a senior paralegal at a big law firm and whose system I’ve had a chance to look at recently, is on just this track: focused on providing targeted information to a transactional lawyer or paralegal who turns to the Net looking for a specific question answered or form provided.  My guess is that the service that succeeds in addressing this need will end up being a paid subscription model, rather than a free service supported by advertising, but I might be wrong (given the resurgence of the ad model and the recent results of Yahoo! and what we all presume about the profitability of the still-privately-held-but-not-for-long google).  I’d guess that there are many others working on it, given that anyone who has searched for good legal information online usually ends up wasting loads of time and coming up with forms or advice that’s off-the-mark or out-of-date.  Maybe it’ll be a weblog that succeeds.  (Anybody else have favorites on this front?)

I have high hopes yet for the Net’s impact on the practice of law.

I’m preparing for teaching a class on Monday on the question of whether we’re headed for an all-IP future.  It’s focused primarily on the decision-points that a policy-maker in a developing country might face today and in the medium-term future.  A first cut at notes are here.

A Think Tank has a small handful of obvious tools at its disposal.  First and foremost, there’s the Conference.  (Other tools include the White Paper; the Case Study; Testimony; Advice; Courses/Seminars/Online Offerings of Various Sorts; and a very few other things.)

One of the learnings from BloggerCon II is that an “un-conference” can be very refreshing.  An inversion of audience and panel/keynote, with the right structure, *can* work (maybe not always, but for some topics and within some communities with certain social norms).  Dave has more on this phenomenon, and particularly the role of the discussion leader.  Lance Knobel, as usual, says it better than I could (and as the former Davos organizer, this is one man who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to conferences).  I like it. 

A previous learning that we’ve been seeking to refine is the Food for Thought dinner.  Either after the main day of the conference or in the middle evening, try organizing dinners at area restaurants on specific themes, and throw up an online sign-up form.  Each FFT dinner has a leader, whose job it is to pose the Hard Question to the table and to record the insights that pop out of the conversation over broken bread (and perhaps a bit of wine).

Given the number of conferences we put on, it would be sad if we weren’t improving — or at least seeking to innovate — as we go along.  Help, please, if you have ideas.

My new all-time favorite blog post, via Dave (to whom huge thanks and congratulations are much in order).  I think that pulling off two major conferences in a single year as a fellow has got to be a Berkman record. 

WK, CB, thanks for stepping up, and to so many Berkman(iacs) – past, present, and future – for coming out.

And not least, official thanks *from* the Berkman Center at HLS to all those who traveled from near and far to spend a Saturday with us at BC II.  Faithful and creative bloggers, you continue to inspire, delight, impress!

By Jack Balkin & Sanford Levinson, How to Win Cites and Influence People. 
It’s actually just as relevant to the blogosphere as to the legal
academy: “Friends are usually more than happy to cite you, especially if
you offer to cite them in return.”

I’m happily blogging along here at BC II, sitting next tomy friend Susan Crawford in Pound 200, HLS, one flight up from where we were yesterday on Digital Media’s speedbumps.  Quite a different feel overall, but same positive energy.  Very fun.

Susan and I have decided that: time is our enemy, life is our
friend.  (A propos of conversations about reading 500 — yikes! –
weblogs a day.  I can’t manage more than a couple, even with the
help of RSS.  Bummer.)

Fresh — perhaps too fresh, Ethan says — research
for BloggerCon discussion by Ethan Zuckerman, many months in the
coming.  Required reading, (and following hereafter as it
iterates), for anyone
focused on the breadth and reach of the blogosphere, the added value of
weblogs on a global scale, the future of journalism, the future of
ideas…  How do bloggers stack up against mainstream news sources
in terms of talking about topics related to various parts of the
world?  This inquiry, the next step of his Global Attention Profile research, is just terrific.

Today at the Berkman Center, we’re exploring Speedbumps, one of our five scenarios in the Digital Media
project.  (Should it be called a “pothole,” not a
“speedbump”?  Or “EZPass”?).  It’s a 40-person gathering here in Pound Hall on
the HLS campus.  Topics generally on the table: what do the
content industries really want — what’s digital media nirvana look
like?  Is spoofing effective?  Is traffic up or down on the
P2P networks, for music, movies, TV files?  Is interdiction an
illegal denial of service attack?  One aspect of speedbumps: could
we explore a research project that gave a very clear sense of what’s
really going on here?

All sorts of new and funky questions emerging for the practice: Kevin O’Keefe (see also lexBlog) is asking whether lawyers should be running ads on their weblogs.  One practicing lawyer, he notes via newsobserver.com, supposedly made $1,000 last month from largely left-leaning political ads running on her blog, thanks to the blogads model (the head of which will be at BloggerCon II this weekend).