As my first act as Technology Committee Chair, I must thank Paul Lavelle for his work on the committee over the past 2 years and for many years leading up to his chairmanship. As most of you know, Paul was recently elected to the DRI Board of Directors as an at-large director. Paul worked very hard to sustain and grow the Technology Committee and E-Discovery Task Force. It is with joy that we say good luck to Paul as he moves on to bigger and better things.
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Introduction

Writers have faced the risk of defamation claims for many years. Starting in the fixed media – newspapers, magazines and books – those claims were troublesome, but usually manageable. The writer knew what he or she was writing and the actual process of publishing invariably included an editor’s review and revision. In addition to improving the quality of the writing, this built a considerable time lag into the system and what may originally have been written in the heat of the moment had a metaphorical chance to cool on the windowsill before it was cleared to be read by the public. Moreover, the channels of distribution were relatively well understood, controlled and predictable. Writers and publishers had some idea of their audience, and their standards and sensibilities. Broadcasting also had some built-in safeguards since programming could be shown in given time slots, and signals had geographic limits. Together, that meant the audience for a given program would be predictable.

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A new technology that is getting the attention of judges and law clerks, and therefore the attention of computer-saavy litigators, is the digital brief on CD-ROM. Electronic briefs, quickly becoming popular in appellate cases, also offer exciting new prospects for pretrial practice. An electronic brief, like most techniques, cannot salvage a bad argument, but it can keep the court from overlooking a good one.

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In Part One – Identifying the Risks – we discussed how the increased use of Instant Messaging (“IM”) technologies has introduced new risks to businesses. Risks such as lost productivity, security threats, regulatory non-compliance and various legal risks are not uncommon with a technology in such an early stage as instant messaging is today. For example, many of the challenges with instant messaging were encountered in the early days of e-mail during the late 70’s and mid 80’s. Though the technology has changed, the risk management tools remain similar and include a combination of awareness/education, policies and technological control. These responses are discussed below.
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