Wired GC

law from the inside out

Archives for March 2006

The F Bomb

No, not that one.

It’s the sort of bomb that Fidelity dropped on Hewlett-Packard when it disclosed that a company laptop containing personal information on 196,000 HP employees was recently stolen.

The laptop contained “… data including the participants’ names, addresses, birthdates and social security numbers.” It was reportedly being used for an offsite meeting. Fidelity is doing big-time damage control:

Fidelity, which provides financial services for about 21 million people, says it hasn’t detected any misuse of the information and that safeguards in place may prevent misuse. The application with the data had a temporary license that has expired, so the data would be difficult to interpret and “generally unusable,” a spokeswoman says. And the company is requiring additional authentication to access the affected HP accounts.

So if I’m an HP employee, I’m hopping mad. If I’m one of the other 20 million or so customers of Fidelity, I’m thinking the word “Vanguard” sounds rather inviting right about now, Paul McCartney ads notwithstanding (turn your speakers down).

In an age of growing concerns about customer privacy, I find it staggering that personal data is moving around on the laptops of a company as sophisticated as Fidelity. Particularly when it includes the Rosetta Stone: apparently unencrypted SS numbers. Do you think this is the only time this has ever happened at Fidelity? The only time it has happened in the financial services industry? What about the healthcare industry?

The politicians are still arguing about this stuff.

Despite all the privacy protections instituted by many companies, if laptops or sync-able PDAs can copy and take offsite deeply personal customer information, legislation or regulation will soon follow. Thus the innocent are punished by the sins of the guilty.

It’s another reason why “privacy” is going to be a key word for GCs and their corporate compliance programs in the future.

Like tomorrow.

Fidelity employee stuck in traffic?

never stop doing what you love

Takes One to Know One

Publisher and author Cameron Stracher left Taste at the door and laid the gavel to legal bloggers in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.

Summarized here in the WSJ Law Blog, the piece is not apparently link-worthy, even for us loyal subscribers (see if this trick works); Peter Lattman provides some great excerpts.

For those of you who missed it, here’s the substance: legal bloggers are largely frustrated lawyers who want to be the next Grisham, Turow or Scottoline. And writing a book is far different from tapping out a blog:

Quotidian blog entries succumb to what the late author Frank Conroy called “abject naturalism,” the agglomeration of details devoid of larger structure. Without a clear narrative thread, a blog is simply sound and fury, signifying nothing but misplaced ambition.

Ouch. Yes, I had to look it up.

That would have been enough to make the meek among us crawl back into our cubicles. Mr. Stracher, however, can’t resist the full court press:

Good writing, contrary to the advice of your creative writing teacher, is about more than what you know. The world these writers are trying so desperately to flee is not a world any of us would want to visit for more than five pages: the overbearing boss, the dehumanizing office, the mindless drudgery. It might have worked for Kafka, but only after he turned himself into a cockroach.

The mini-bio at the end of this legal blogging steamroller discloses that:

Mr. Stracher is publisher of the New York Law School Law Review and author of “Double Billing: A Young Lawyer’s Tale of Greed, Sex, Lies and the Pursuit of a Swivel Chair.”

Missing from this is that Mr. Stracher more than a law review publisher, he is a Professor at the same law school. My law review didn’t have a publisher, but we did have our own coffee maker.

Given the slant of Professor Stracher’s WSJ blog-bluster, another fact would have been relevant: he is a blogger himself. Maybe not technically a legal blogger, since his blog is entitled “Dinner With Dad.” The subtitle, “A Blog for Hungry Parents,” lets us know that it’s not for everyone. Here’s an entry from yesterday, after putting the WSJ op-ed to bed:

No cooking for me this week — not since the gnocchi. I’ve been traveling for a conference, and an out of town dinner. It’s actually the second week I have failed to make my commitment of dinner at home 5 nights a week. As with the first failure, however, I don’t feel badly; rather, it makes me realize how important these dinners have become, and how diligent I’ve been (for the most part) in making them happen. So I won’t lash myself with a wet udon noodle tonight.

Then the other meatball drops. This is really a blog on its way to a book (like Scoble?):

Meanwhile, as chachlilmum noticed, I have another Taste piece in the Journal today, this one about lawyers and bloggers, of which I am one. What I have found, as I write the book, Dinner with Dad, is that it’s completely different from this blog, and uses almost no material from it. Rather, the blog is a diary filled with the signposts of this year to remind me where I was as I try to create and shape a book based on that year. Will I be successful? Who knows. But at least I’ve had a lot of good dinners.

Welcome to the club, Cameron. Here’s an alternate title for your upcoming book:

“Kafka in the Kitchen.”

Hold on to Your Business Card

And watch out who you send an Outlook vCard to.

According to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, web company Jigsaw wants your contact information. So badly it seems, that it will pay others for it.

Recovering attorney Mr. Arrington explains Jigsaw thusly:

Unlike competitors like Hoovers and InfoUSA, which gather company information by semi-legitimate means such as scouring SEC filings, cold calling companies and asking for information, and reviewing other public documents, Jigsaw simply pays people to upload other people’s contact information. Users are paid $1 for every contact they upload, and some users have uploaded information on tens of thousands of people. See the demo (and note the other demos on that page as well). Jigsaw is also self correcting, and incentivizes people to also correct bad contact information.

If innovative ways to use and grow Internet applications for business are Web 2.0, Jigsaw may be Law 9.11.

I think the business card of the future will have your name on it (first and last, no middle initial), company name, and an email address that doesn’t resolve to your company domain. This is your public contact/email persona. No phone numbers, no fax numbers (can you say “Nigerian scam fax” three times quickly?), no address, and for heaven’s sake no cell phone number.

Then if the person hits your email (like lawman2681@gmail.com) and you want to continue the contact, you can, over time, work them into your truly personal business contact information.

With Google Maps and telephone number reverse lookups, we now know what Sun’s Scott McNealy meant when he said we have no privacy, get over it.

No word on whether Mr. McNealy’s contact info is available through Jigsaw.

Listen Up

We are often told to listen more. You know, the “you have two ears and one mouth” bromide.

But as managers, we can’t listen unless people first feel free to talk to us about important things. Many people won’t talk, even when encouraged to do so. Why is this?

According to HBS Working Knowledge, a prime reason is fear. More precisely, a fear of speaking up to internal authorities.

This summary of research by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson and Penn State professor James Detert makes for fascinating reading; here’s a sample:

Turning to the modern economy, most of us depend on hierarchical organizations and their agents (i.e., bosses) to meet many of our basic needs for economic support and human relationships. Thus, fear of offending those above us is both natural and widespread. One way we can get in trouble with those above us is to speak up in ways perceived as challenging of authority or critical of cherished programs. Given the exaggerated and real reasons to fear offending authorities, it isn’t surprising that people clam up when the signals seem unfavorable.

How does a manager work to create a better environment to encourage people to speak up (what the authors call “upward voice”)? According to the authors, there are two things. One is allaying a concern that one taking on significant risk of personal harm (e.g., embarrassment, loss of material resources). The other is to listen and follow up on things said so next time a person does not feel that time is being wasted by talking.

Have you ever been in a meeting where you had something important to say, but didn’t?

Exactly.

So, apparently, have your direct reports. Maybe even today.