Matt’s cartoons for The Daily Telegraph have for a long time been favourites of mine so I was particularly amused to see this apposite offering a few days ago as I settled into my seat on the BA flight to New York where I was to attend Legal Tech 2011. As a Legal Tech virgin I was determined to make the most of what is probably the pre-eminent gathering of the Legal Technology industry each year. And I did!

Many other commentators regularly write up the proceedings at Legal Tech and I do not propose to compete with them not least because the musings of a virgin may be of little interest to those more enured to the process. Suffice to say that it was well worth braving the 15 inches of snow sparkling on the streets and in Central Park as well as the biting wind and enjoying the lovely clear sunny skies to meet up with a lot of people whose names I knew and to whom I can at last put a face.

My colleagues Emma Kettleton, Narjara Bueno and I were able to spend time with clients and US law firms outside the conference so our days (and sometimes nights) were pretty full but I managed to visit one of my favourite museums, the Frick Collection, and to visit Ground Zero which, despite myself, I found to be an emotional experience.

It is invidious to mention names at these events as one sees so many people and attends so many events and is entertained by so many kind people that I would hate to leave anyone out. In any event I am getting round to speaking to all those I need to thank on a personal basis.

But I need to mention the people at Index Engines because I am very excited by the technology which enables us to index the contents of back up tapes (rather than restore them) at a cost and over a time which compares very favourably to the old practice of restoration. Meeting those responsible for this remarkable technology was a thrill to a jaded lawyer because using their technology marks a real advance in the process of finding relevant material to use in litigation at a cost which is much more likely to be proportionate than restoration used to be. Anyone wanting to know more should contact me or one of my colleagues as we are actively promoting this product in the market and achieving success with it. It is fair to say that we have not yet encountered anything but praise for this extraordinary advance in unearthing ESI and making it available in short order and at a reasonable cost.

Coming back to the UK from the US is always something of a culture shock so you can imagine my surprise when I learned that the Supreme Court had “approved the use of Twitter in court hearings” as one headline had it. I thought that was odd and could not imagine counsel tweeting to their Lordships or what advantages that would bring.

Of course, once I had read around the subject a bit I realised that what the Court had done was to permit journalists, lawyers and members of the public to tweet about what was going on in court. Bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted, I thought, but not wishing to be churlish I have to concede that, as long as there are safeguards in place in sensitive cases, it is good to see our highest court keeping up with the advances in technology which now rules our lives in so many ways.

This reminds me that the courts are coming to terms with the explosion in the use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter and decisions are starting to emerge (such as Macmillan v Hummingbird Speedway Inc, about which I have written before).

The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) is also getting in on the act. This after a number of highly publicised “mistakes” by the Twitterati in recent weeks. For example, do you remember the ex Liverpool player who tweeted his rant after Manchester United defeated Liverpool last month and sought to make a point by posting a picture of the referee wearing a United shirt. His attitude (“And they call him one of the best referees? That’s a joke. SMH (shaking my head))” cost him a fine of £10,000. More recently a fashion designer tweeted about the riots in Cairo that “rumour is they heard that our spring collection is now available online…” The tweet drew extensive criticism over the Net and he apologised.

Then the PCC ruled that tweets are public property. You could see this in The Times of Feb 9th if you are not prevented by their paywall. For those of you who are shut out of the paper, the PCC ruled that tweets published by a civil servant at the Department of Transport called Sarah Baskerville (or Baskers as she likes to be known) were public property despite the fact that Baskers posted a disclaimer that her tweets were not offered in an official capacity. She had twittered about government policies as spin and had complained about red wine induced headaches at work but had overlooked the fact that tweets can be searched and seen by anyone interested unless certain privacy measures are adopted. She argued for a reasonable expectation of privacy and that reporting of her tweets was misleading but the PCC decided that republication of the material by national newspapers did not amount to an invasion of her privacy despite that fact that they had originally been intended for a smaller audience.

Here we have yet another example of officialdom deciding that people posting material on social media sites forego their right to privacy in most cases. How long before we have an English court decision on the subject? At least now we will all know about it when it happens, or more probably as it happens via Twitter from the Supreme Court!

I tell you, John Wayne never had to put up with this. Nor did he have to deal with the worry that Red Indians had hacked into his email account or posted a dodgy picture of him and tagged it on Facebook. Today, he would never keep it under his hat!

Even that did not really capture the menace behind the image until one realised that the blemishes grouped together in the left hand corner of the back of the chair were in fact the marks made by the bullets fired by his executioners into the chest and heart of convicted killer Ronnie Lee Gardner.

Whatever your views about capital punishment I was left with the overwhelming sense that this was not what I wanted to see published in my newspaper. After all, in the days when we had capital punishment here we were not treated to interviews with the hangman or grisly pictures of the swinging noose ( or at least not since the days of public executions).

Too much information, you might think! But then I came across the extraordinary news that the Utah State Attorney General had tweeted the news that Gardner’s pleas had been rejected shortly before the execution took place. He tweeted: “I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner’s execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied  his victims”.

The fact that the Attorney-General announced to the world that he had allowed the execution to proceed is not, in itself, remarkable. There was a significant public interest in the event and if he had made the announcement in a letter or on TV I doubt if there would have been any controversy. However, the fact that he used the medium of Twitter has caused a storm with commentators arguing that the use of this medium to disseminate this kind of information is inappropriate and others arguing that it is all a matter of getting the information into the public domain and the means used were quick and efficient.

I mentioned late last year that the first injunction was served in this country using Twitter and that the Twitterati had been at least in part responsible for the lifting of that horrible animal the super injunction in the case of the Ivory Coast toxic waste dumping. [See:  The Last Straw 6th October, 2009 and King Charles I and the Twitterati 27th October, 2009]

Tweeting injunctions and disseminating information about them seems to me to be in a different category altogether from State officials tweeting information about life and death. Efficient as it may be I cannot help but feel that this type of communication should not be used for subject matter as potentially explosive as reprieves ( or not) on Death Row.

But if anyone thought that Twitter did not concern them they should be quickly disabused of the idea. In a recent case of Sexting (yes, it really exists) in California, (where else?) a Sergeant Quon appeared to be sending an inordinate number of texts on his departmental pager. Department officials discovered he was sending an average of 28 texts per shift but that only three were work related. The personal messages were largely to his wife and mistress both of whom happened to work for the local police department. Quon sued the police department for violating his privacy after they sought to recover from him the cost of the personal texts. But in a unanimous judgement, the Supreme Court held that government officials were entitled to review emails and texts on work owned mobile phones and computers as long as there is a legitimate work related purpose!

It is a strange old world out there and woe betide anyone who thinks that Twitter is not something they need to be concerned with. After all the next client who rings you (assuming they use anything as old fashioned as a telephone) may be wanting advice about a text they sent at an unfortunate moment to someone they would rather not have involved from a place they did not want their nearest and dearest to find out about.

You may not like it as a medium but you need to be aware of it and its capacity to surprise!

Frustrated by Parliament’s refusal to grant him money and irritated in particular by the speeches of the members, the King tried to arrest John Pym, Sir Arthur Hazelrigg, William Strode, John Hampden and Denzil Holles in the Commons Chamber, an event which helped to trigger the start of the Civil War in 1642. News of the King’s intentions had filtered through to the five who had long since fled the Chamber by the time the King arrived.

No monarch has entered the Chamber since and, as we all know, the King lost his throne and his head in 1649!

In recent weeks we have seen numbers of headlines and articles on the subject of a so called super injunction. In case you missed it, the case involved a secret report on how a Dutch oil trading company called Trafigura dumped toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. The report had been commissioned after the incident and found that the dumping would have been illegal under European law. The company went to Court in England to try and stop its publication after a leaked copy of the report found its way to the Guardian newspaper.

Now I have not seen the report nor the terms of the injunction but it was reported that, as well as wanting to prevent the publication of the report, the company also wanted to prevent the fact that a Labour MP had tabled a question in the Commons relating to the Trafigura affair from becoming public.

The company succeeded initially. In effect, it obtained an injunction which prevented anyone from reporting the fact that the injunction had been sought and obtained, from reporting the fact that a question had been placed on the Commons order paper, AND from reporting that those two things had happened! Presumably, in this Kafkaesque fashion, it also prevented anyone thinking about reporting the two facts from doing so! Thinking about them or reporting them I mean!

Fortunately, the Twitterati saved the day! Users of Twitter, presumably in fewer than 140 characters, managed to tell the world about the existence of the question on the Commons order paper and about a website where the report could be read.

Once that happened, the injunction was lifted.

This was a significant victory for the users of Twitter in the same month that the court allowed the first injunction to be served by Twitter (see The Last Straw, 6th October). I would go further and say it was a significant victory against the so called super injunction and the ever-present trend towards unwarranted secrecy in our national life.

Given the current furore about MPs’expenses, I must say here that MPs and Parliament have a lot of fence mending to do but, nonetheless, the tweeters have achieved a welcome affirmation of the principle that Parliament must be allowed to go about its business without fear or hindrance from anyone, be they ever so mighty.

Was this not what the Civil War was all about?