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Does Twitter Have Legal Claims for the Hacking and Posting Confidential Company Documents? In an interesting development for Twitter, French hacker “Hacker Croll” recently compromised confidential information of the Silicon Valley microblogging phenomenon’s top executives. The security breach didn’t end there, in fact after the hacker used simple techniques to gain access to the execs’ Google accounts, he then retrieved more than 300 private documents stored on Google Docs and emailed the same to various tech news outlets....

BP is a company that cares about the “small people,” but its representatives seemed somewhat put off by the Fifth Circuit’s decision to uphold the details of the multi-billion dollar Gulf settlement. This latest blow in what has been a long battle for BP affirmed that when you settle with the “small people” and their businesses, you end up having to pay the “small people” what you promised. Does BP have a legal leg to stand on?...

Instagram, the photo-sharing app, is a portal to 800 million users. That’s a lot of potential clients, but how do you turn your photos into business opportunities? It might work for photographers, filmmakers, or other visual artists, but who wants to look at pictures of lawyers or their office furniture? One superlawyer figured it out. He says its about connecting with clients in a non-legal way. Insta-Famous Todd Spodek, a New York City attorney, has been featured on Fox News, Entertainment Tonight and Entrepreneur....

The Hamilton Township plaintiffs are celebrating their victory (in the form of a settlement and consent decree) against a public official that blocked them from an official Facebook page where information was being publicly disseminated. This win may be the first of many in the line of recent cases over whether individuals can be blocked by official government social media channels. The consent decree, approved by the federal district court, orders Township Trustee David Wallace Jr....

In Johnson v. Upton, No. 09-16090, a capital habeas matter, the court affirmed the denial of petitioner’s habeas petition, holding that 1) it was not objectively unreasonable for an attorney to assume that if there were some powerful reason for his client’s escape from pretrial detention other than the usual reason for escapes (not wanting to be convicted and in jail), the client would have told him that reason when they discussed the impact the escape evidence would have at trial; 2) the victim’s death certificate would not put a reasonably competent attorney on notice of a need to do more discovery or to obtain testimony from a medical expert; and 3) trial counsel’s investigation into mitigating circumstances was not objectively unreasonable....

What’s a Bieber?! Those who used commercial breaks during the Super Bowl to stock up on snacks may have missed Best Buy’s first-ever Super Bowl ad. Featuring Ozzy Osbourne and Justin Bieber, the commercial introduced the company’s new Buy Back Program. The Buy Back Program seems pretty simple–you pay a little money upfront, and in turn receive a partial refund when you decide to trade the item in for an upgrade....

Digital estate planning is a relatively new concept, and can include a client’s websites, email accounts, and the contents of his computers. But what about eBooks, iTunes music files, and other downloaded purchases? Some downloads can be treated as ordinary assets, if a client obtains the right of ownership with his purchase. But that’s where dealing with iTunes and eBook purchases can get tricky, MarketWatch points out. In general, that license cannot be transferred to another user, according to MarketWatch....

Late last week, the biggest BigLaw billing dispute in recent memory came to an anti-climactic conclusion with a confidential settlement, reports Reuters. The motivation to settle is certainly understandable. Though an unpaid $675,000 tab is quite a bit of bucks, and compromising on the bill sets a bit of a dangerous precedent, the cost of the negative publicity to DLA Piper was more significant. We won’t recap the emails in full, but the tone of the emails was an inappropriate mocking of the firm’s billing practices (“churn that bill, baby!...

Way back in the day, when a young blogger was in law school, he was challenged by his professor to envision what the future of law firms would look like. After making jokes about drive-thru divorce firms (they exist!?!), he set his tech geek mind to the task and really thought: “how would I design a firm?” He wrote this, later republished as a blog post. You can talk about cloud computing, DropBox, and other ways of sharing files between computers, but so far, there has not been a reliable, widely adopted platform that can manage an entire firm’s tasks, clients, research, forms, billing, and staff all via the Internet....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet. Foreigners can be protected by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). The parts of the ECPA that prevent ISP’s from revealing electronic communications apply to foreigners when their emails are stored on a domestic server, the Ninth Circuit has ruled. In Suzlon Energy v. Microsoft, the plaintiff had directed a subpoena to Microsoft seeking the substance of emails between a citizen of India with respect to fraud litigation in Australia....

It’s supremely frustrating when potential clients (or worse, current clients) think they know more about the law than you do. Usually it’s because a friend of a friend (not a lawyer) gave them legal advice, and hey, why aren’t you doing this thing for me? You don’t want to condescend, obviously. But you do want to make clear that your client isn’t going to gain your years of knowledge and experience through a quick Internet search....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the Internet. Many web sites prohibit children under the age of 13. It’s not necessary out of altruism, but because the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) contains various provisions and requirements concerning special treatment that must be accorded to the children. The statute is designed to protect young children from web sites that might seek to exert influence over them by obtaining personal data and marketing to them....

Have you won an award? Were you quoted in the newspaper? Are you going to be the “legal expert” on the tomorrow’s morning program? It’s great to be recognized as a leader within the legal community, but there are extra steps involved in using that attention to attract new clients. This week, we’re addressing how to leverage media coverage. Think of leveraging media coverage like a trial. In opening statements, you tell the jury what you will prove....

You know what was vastly underrated? The Smith-Corona typewriter. Typewriters didn’t distract you with celebrity gossip. They didn’t have email alerts popping up in the corner of your screen, ready to interrupt your work every few minutes. And eye fatigue? Not so much, not when you’re not staring at an artificially lit computer screen for 8 to 10 hours straight. Sadly, the typewriter is no more. Research, brief writing, and even filing is done using these damned computers and the “information superhighway....

Federal prosecutors seem intent on kicking a dead horse – no disrespect intended to Sen. Bob Menendez. But Menendez, who had a lock on re-election until the government came after him, was nearly acquitted in a federal corruption case that ended in a mistrial last year. Now the Department of Justice wants to retry him, and his Senate situation is precarious even if he beats the charges again. Is it politics if he is a Democrat fighting a Republican administration?...

Last June, Fifth Circuit Judge Edith Jones was accused of making racist comments about a person’s propensity for violent crime and otherwise biased comments about the death penalty. A week later, she was pulled off of a death penalty case. How about a year later? It turns out that Judge Jones was cleared of any wrongdoing by the Judicial Council of the District of Columbia Circuit (the complaint was transferred out of the Fifth Circuit, for obvious reasons) back in August, though the order was finally made public yesterday after the complainants filed an appeal, reports the ABA Journal....

Well, I wish I’d known this earlier. Apparently, you can make a career as a treasure hunter, even in these modern times. Though it’s not easy, as the Columbus-America Discovery Group learned when they went into receivership after collecting sunken treasure from the S.S. Central America. Their lawyer – and I suppose lawyers are a type of treasure hunter as well – moved to claim some of that gold himself as a reward for his aid in “the continuing salvage of the sunken” treasure fleet....

If your law firm uses unpaid interns or paralegals, you won’t want to miss this legal cliffhanger. A class-action lawsuit is trying to reel in the practice of unpaid internships, with a Hollywood film as the backdrop. The lawsuit sets the scene: Two interns on the movie Black Swan say they were made to perform menial tasks – taking out the trash, getting coffee, shuffling papers – while Fox Searchlight Productions reaped the rewards of their work....

It turns out that General Counsels aren’t the untouchable, super powerful figures some people think they are. A new book detailing the fall of Merrill Lynch sheds some interesting light on how swiftly things can come crashing down. Crash of the Titans: Greed, Hubris, The Fall of Merrill Lynch and the Near Collapse of Bank of America. This verbose title is a new book by Greg Farrell, who takes readers through the life of banking general counsel Tim Mayopoulos....

Using the internet just got a bit riskier, thanks to the Ninth Circuit. In two recent rulings, separated by only one week, the Ninth Circuit has greatly expanded the reach of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a federal anti-hacking law from 1986. Under the Ninth Circuit’s new interpretation of the CFAA, you can violate the law by using someone else’s password to access a computer database, or simply by using a website you’ve been told to stay off of....