Technology Industry Legal Blog

Different situations can lead to a corporate buyout.  As a business move, a majority shareholder may seek to buyout the minority shareholders, or one company may seek to acquire a majority of another company’s shares.  Buyouts may also be contractually forced under a company’s governing documents or legally forced by […]

A new class action trend aimed at large companies has emerged in the United States. New York, California, and Florida have been the breeding grounds for these class action claims brought under each state’s “wiretapping” laws. More specifically, classes bringing these claims have accused companies of violating wiretapping laws by […]

In Florida, the public and press have a fundamental right of access to judicial proceedings, which includes access to documents submitted to the court. This may be troublesome for businesses seeking to maintain the confidentiality of sensitive information, such as trade secrets or other proprietary information. However, under certain circumstances, […]

In today’s digital world, there are many scams that fraudsters employ to steal money and information from your company.  Those computer-based scams include hacking, phishing, ransom-ware, and spoofing to name only a few. The first step in protecting against these cyber crimes is to have the appropriate information technology and […]

Regulatory Compliance causes many companies to proactively deal with information security. There are multiple federal laws that impact and regulate the protection of Personally Identifiable Information (“PII”)[1], some of the most well-known being GLBA[2] (regulating financial institutions), HIPAA[3] (regulating the healthcare industry), SOX[4] (regulating US public company boards, management and […]

On September 29, 2016 the Florida Supreme Court amended rules 4-1.1 and 6-10.3 to the Rules Regulating The Florida Bar. As a result, Florida attorneys will now be required to obtain 3 credit hours of CLE in approved technology programs. Further, language was added to the Comment to Rule 4.1.1 Competence, which reads as follows:

Competent representation may also involve the association or retention of a non-lawyer advisor of established technological competence in the field in question. Competent representation also involves safeguarding confidential information relating to the representation, including, but not limited to, electronic transmissions and communications.

What does this mean for litigators dealing with electronic evidence? I like to say that the realm of eDiscovery is a melding of legal and IT, two groups of professionals who speak different languages, and who under typical circumstances do not care to speak the language of the other. We have all heard that attorneys speak legalese, and we know of the “IT speak” that flies over the heads of IT industry outsiders. How can we manage the additional eDiscovery industry terminology that is a necessary part of the conversations between IT and legal that surround litigation or a government investigation? At the time of my entry into the field of eDiscovery in 2013, I had not even heard of the term metadata, much less jargon like DeNIST, TIFFing, load file, and so on.

Since the advent of the computer era and its infectious spread throughout the technological world we know today, the possibility for computer related fraud has always existed. With the rise of the internet, access to all kinds of information had never been easier or faster. Even top secret information from intelligence agencies of the United States were at risk and vulnerable to hackers or people simply looking for some at-home entertainment. To a hacker, the world was at their fingertips, literally. This Blog post seeks to explore some of the laws implicated by illegal hacking and what civil remedies victims are afforded.