Lawyer's Blog Causes Judge's Ire

In an April 27, 2006 story in The Recorder, Pam Smith reports on a DA who blogged about an open case, and a judge read it. [edit: Story now available for free here] Boiled down, after reading the blog postings -- in which the prosecutor called his opposing counsel "chicken" and some titles that reportedly could not be repeated in polite conversation -- the judge reportedly called his conduct "juvenile, obnoxious and unprofessional."

The lawyer apparently testified that he used password protection or some other security measure to limit access to only a few friends, but somehow access became unrestricted, perhaps due to a security problem with the website.  Interestingly, the judge wrote that the attorney should have known that like e-mail his posts might eventually be "uncontrollably redistributed."

In the speech referenced below, I talked about this sort of problem and predicted it might happen -- I'm not happy for the parties involved here that it did, but hopefully this will encourage lawyers to be careful, firms to adopt policies, and clients to take notice.