In-House Counsel

Second Life

By legalthing

The handsome guy with the five o'clock shadow seated on the right is my avatar. Someone in Sun's marketing group created it. And, let me stop right here and give them a big "thanks" for not adding a dorsal shark fin, forked tail or similar appendages. Given the sometimes less than positive public esteem for my profession, someone could have had a lot of fun with this particular assignment.

The reason for the avatar was an internal Sun employee conference held last week in Second Life. The meeting included a number of Sun executives interviewed throughout the day by Chris Mellissinos in our Sun virtual campus. Sun employees were able to attend either in Second Life or to watch and listen to the meeting in progress through a browser window on their desktop

During my session, I spoke a bit about the interesting legal issues raised by some social networking technologies. But most of the conversation was about how these technologies can be a valuable tool for the legal profession. For example, some law schools are already using virtual classrooms for instruction. My team has also been discussing whether this would be a good way to deliver compliance and other training to employees. No doubt there will plenty of future opportunity to use sites like Second Life to enable information sharing within firms, in-house legal departments and between attorneys and clients. But, to be candid, at this stage the virtual experience is not yet compelling. Despite my good looking avatar-self, the overall visual effect is still primitive and coarse and the UI is a barrier. Overall, the experience feels more like participating in a conference call while watching an mid-1960's cartoon. But one only has to imagine the impact when the bandwidth and rendering capabilities deliver the visual experience found in today's gaming and movie releases. At that point, people will sense a greater integration between their virtual and "real" identities making these tools more effective.

To some extent this is similar to evolution of the Internet. I still remember using my Mosiac browser at Sun to connect for the first time. I waited for what seemed an interminably long time to download a photograph of a painting in the Louvre. As I watched each row of pixels complete, I thought to myself that at some point this is going to touch every aspect of our lives. And, a little more than a decade later - it does.

Full post as published by The Legal Thing... on May 04, 2008 (boomark / email).