Weblogging - A Lawyer's Nightmare

I spent all day yesterday being deposed in a ridiculous case where the company that bought one of our companies years ago subsequently went bankrupt and is now suing us because they claim that our company sunk theirs. Trust me, they sunk their own company. Ours had very little to do with the mess they created.

But that’s not what i am blogging about tonight. My lawyer and i spent half the day on friday going through all the emails i ever sent or recieved about this company. Emails are the nightmare of the moment for lawyers. They rue the day that email was invented. Because all of a sudden, everything is in writing. It can be retrieved, read, analyzed, taken out of context, etc. Microsoft was the poster boy of this phenomenon.

But now we’ve got blogging.

And so, about three hours into my seven hours of hell, the lawyer on the other side, who is grilling me non-stop, says “… Mr. Wilson, in your weblog, it says …”. My lawyer looks at me with this panicked face that says “what the f..ck are weblogs”?

Turns out it was no big deal. Fortunately, there wasn’t anything on this blog that could hurt me or our case.

But it made me think, when will we have our first case impacted by the truth told in weblogs?