Although Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs and social networking offer many advantages for in-house counsel (read the August Technology story, "Law 2.0") advances in technology do not come entirely without risk. Reed Smith Partner Joe Rosenbaum, who writes the Legal Bytes blog, cites several concerns that attorneys have about confidentiality, disclosure and security when using Web 2.0:
"You are getting some trepidation among inside counsel, and rightfully so, where they have blogs, cloud computing and shared applications. It's one thing when you have a PC sitting on your desk like an electronic file cabinet. All of a sudden you connect everyone to a server shared behind a firewall that the legal department has. Then [documents] are no longer within the legal department, they reside on a server that's accessible to everyone. Take it one step further, and outsource it to an IT company or experiment with cloud computing.
"Until the tools that are necessary for secure computing and confidentiality become relatively commonplace, in-house legal departments are going to be slow to adopt them."
