The International Legal Technical Standards Organization initial draft standards (to which I contributed) has just been published.
I predict that they will be the subject of much debate over the next few months, but the idea for the standard, the brainchild of Jeff Goens, CEO of Dialawg, is a good one and will be refined over the next couple years. There have already been a few blog posts - Press Release here.
There is an Internet meme that applies to most standards: TL;DR. At under 50 pages, these standards are a scintilla of other standards that many industries - let alone 'The Law' - have come to be governed by. But from my experience in the technology service business, any sentence that includes the word 'computer' is likely to be too long for most normal people to read.
Nevertheless, I'm pleased that the ILTSO standards emphasized brevity and clarity and are targeted at the technical acumen of a 'normal' person rather than, say, the audience of the MSDN.
With so much change happening in technology today - from cloud computing to mobile devices - these standards are intended to help law firms keep their clients' data safe and their partners out of trouble. Worthy goals for any standard.
