Loren Steffy is a business columnist at the Houston Chronicle who has been blogging about the Enron trial. Steffy has been critical of the defendants, and has also blogged about the defense attorneys working on the case. Steffy recently checked some of the IP addresses of his anonymous commenters, and found out that a bunch of comments — 15 in all — orginated from an IP address controlled by O’Melveny & Myers, counsel for the defendant. We have no idea who at OMM left the comments, but they are, um, not flattering. Check out this post for the details.
My guess is that this will turn out to be one of those “lawyers learn how the Internet works” moments.
Are there really lawyers out there who still don’t understand that internet communication can be at least roughly traced by IP address?
When clerking for fairly large firms, I’ve always gotten an almost afternoon-long talk on confidentiality and the art of generally being subtle and cautious in communications. I guess I never heard anything about IP addresses in any of those, but there was always some talk of “whatever you post on the internet should be something you’d be willing to say out loud in a crowd.”
I don’t think this incident really matters. But there are situations where it really could – or at least where the opposition could make some hay out of it. How many more situations like this will have to crop up before people get it?
I suspect this happens a lot more often than we know. It’s awfully frustrating to see people on public websites getting the facts “wrong,” and to have an easy means of correction, and not be able to use it. I expect the warnings most firms give their associates about speaking to the press, speaking in elevators, etc. will be specifically applied to anonymous blog comments in the near future.
It’s worth noting the commentor on Chron who suggests that the IP addresses might be spoofed. I agree with him that the idea is somewhat farfetched–that’s a lot of work to go to in order to implicate OMM–but the case against them isn’t 100%.
That said, I’ve had some pretty intemperate comments left on my blog, and their IP addresses did track back to some major law firms. That’s one reason I advise people not to blog anonymously: if you use your real name, you never suffer from any sense of false security.