Tort Lawyers New Software Guns Find First Target
Vladimir Lenin once said that ‘Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them’. A lot of software companies, capitalist or not, would be surprised that they could suffer a comparable fate.
Today a lot of people use blogs and twitter and the like, without too much concern about what it could all lead to, other then better and faster communications. Certainly, all should be aware that 1) the WWW never sleeps, and 2) the WWW never forgets. Add to this the fact that the WWW is a giant public record, for any and all to see.
One group in particular should be sensitive about this: Doctors. Some concerns have been raised by the various medical guilds about doctors’ blogging, both actively as in writing them, and passively as in commenting on them.
Several ‘doctor’s only’ blogs allow others, for a fee, to listen in on some of these electronic discussions. The motivation of the ‘others’ is fairly straightforward, but it’s not clear what advantages there are to the doctors’.
Twitter is openly being used by more and more doctors, and some of these may soon come to light in an unexpected way. It seems that the tort lawyers have recognized a new bonanza, and have the tools to mine all that ethereal gold.
The IBM antitrust case took some ten years and generated some 50 million physical documents, with small armies of lawyers analyzing them with their highly paid eyeballs. One result of this was the development, by IBM, of the precursor of XML, lead by – what else? – a lawyer, which may explain some of current technologies’ tendency towards verbosity.
The Microsoft antitrust case took about three years and generated some 3,000 trial exhibits, based on about 30 million documents, mostly emails. These were analyzed programmatically in a fraction of the time it took to elucidate the findings of facts summary. This has led to a growing industry dedicated to ‘e-discovery’, as well as the expected countermeasures as a companion industry.
So, as the tort lawyers start to programmatically analyze the blog and twitter traffic, the initial focus will be doctors, or more accurately, their insurance companies. But this can lead to some new revenue sources. Those caught in this will learn, first hand, what those ‘Jane and John Does 1 through 100 inclusive’ really mean when they get hit with a duces tecum subpoena.
A very wide net, indeed, all done with amazing speed and sophistication by the software that generates the target traffic to begin with, and the amazing speed and sophistication of the software that analyzes it afterwards for all manner of things.
One other thing about public records, physical or electronic. Some of the IBM antitrust documentation is available online, but all of the Microsoft antitrust documentation is. Not too many research done on the former, but armies and legions of analysts and researchers and graduate students and lawyers look at the latter every day.
To recap, succinctly: 1) the WWW never sleeps, 2) the WWW never forgets, 3) the WWW is a giant public record.
© Copyright 2009 Chuck Brooks for FutureWare SCG
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