News

On August 4, 2014, the Committee on Professional Ethics of the  New York State Bar issued Opinion 1014 providing guidelines on how lawyers could solicitate and contact prospective clients after a current client’s recommendation.   Digest: “Lawyer may contact prospective client recommended by current client when prospective client has made known that lawyer should contact […]

On March 2, 2015, the Committee on Professional Ethics of the New York State Bar issued Opinion 1049 providing guidelines on how lawyers could respond to potential clients’ who has posted a question on a discussion-based website (such as Reddit and Twitter) asking to be contacted about a particular legal problem. Digest: “A. Where a […]

On October 30, 2014, the Committee on Professional Ethics of the New York State Bar issued Opinion 1032 providing guidelines on how lawyers could respond to former clients’ critical commentary on the web. A former client had “unfairly characterized the firm’s representation of the former client on a website that provides reviews of lawyers”  but he […]

On January 23, 2015, the Professional Ethics Committee of the Florida Bar issued Florida Proposed Advisory Opinion 14-1 providing guidelines for lawyers advising clients to “clean up” their social media pages not material to litigation. The Committee warns that “What constitutes an ‘unlawful’ obstruction, alteration, destruction, or concealment of evidence is a legal question, outside the scope […]

On June 12, 2015 the French Data protection Authority CNIL (Commission Nationale de l’Information et des Liberté) has ordered Google to process requests to be forgotten on all extension of its websites, not only “fr”. The CNIL has specified that this formal notice is not a sanction but that Google must comply within the fifteen days or […]

The Conseil d’Etat (the French supreme administrative court) sanctioned the CNIL (Commission Nationale de l’Information et des Libertés) which is the Data Protection Agency for not anonymizing the personal data contained in a decision issued that the DPA issued, as recommended by the same CNIL in Délibération n° 01-057 du 29 novembre 2001 portant recommandation sur la diffusion de données […]

Last week a bipartisan bill (Judicial Redress Act of 2015) was introduced by Senators Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). The proposal echoes a  similar proposal in the House presented in March from Congressmen Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and John Conyers (D-Mich.) (here), which received also the support of the major tech companies of the United […]

  On April 23, 2015, the Grand Chamber of the European Convention on Human Rights held, in addition to one other finding, that the conviction for defamation of a lawyer revealing serious shortcomings in the justice system was a disproportionate interference with his right to freedom of expression. Morice v. France, (Application no. 29369/10). On 19 October […]

On May 28, 2015, ABI Research and the International Telecommunication Union issued a Global Cybersecurity Index (GCI) report according to which the U.S. has the strongest cybersecurity in the world. The CGI aims at providing a worldwide snapshot of where countries stand on cybersecurity. It drafts a country-level index and a global ranking on cybersecurity […]

On March 19, 2015, the Italian Data Protection Authority issued Doc 3881513 providing guidelines for web operators performing online profiling. The document applies to web operators established in Italy. The guidelines clarify the principles applicable to profiling activities aiming at singling out users. These profiling activities generally aim at offering targeted services, or advertisement, as […]