Kurt Leafstrand Gets It
On the e-discovery 2.0 blog yesterday at least, he gets what I’ve been saying about social media in regards to legal risks, there’s not much that’s new here:
There’s talk of intellectual property being cast out, irrevocably, onto the Internet for all to see. Or slanderous things being uttered for which your company may be held liable. But, hold on a second: is there really anything new here? Anyone heard of e-mail? Web pages? Peer-to-peer? Google? Instant messaging?
I’d actually go further, anyone heard of the telephone, or face to face conversations in public places? (Not to mention cell phone conversations on a commuter train, *cough*)
Any time one of the people who work for your organization is talking to someone outside of the organization, there’s a risk they’ll say something they shouldn’t about their workplace, and yet we still actually let them do it! Shocking!
I don’t know how business has survived this long, surely it’s time to start requiring your workforce to live in company camps and only interact with coworkers, isn’t it? I mean if you let them go out to dinner, or to a ball game, you have no idea who they might be sitting next to and who they might strike up a conversation with. Surely you can’t risk them complaining about their job, or leaking confidential information, can you? These communications must be blocked! Or at the very least we should have strongly worded and specific policies regarding any and all such possibilities. Just giving employees general guidelines that apply to all such situations can’t possibly be enough. We need a new policy for every new possibility!
Yeah ok, overkill, but not by much.
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agreed, 110%. At the call center where I previously worked, we had *huge* battles about letting customers see "raw" knowledgebase documents written by support engineers. "But what if something's wrong?" would be the argument. Those of us on the "information needs to be available" side of things would reply "if they're wrong in a document, what's to keep them from being wrong on the phone?"
Steven, great example. There is something about seeing something in writing that makes it seem more "real" to people, but the spoken word is just as much of a risk when you're talking to customers, or clients in the law firm case.