digital media opportunities for lawyers in kenyalsk.or.ke/downloads/digital media - david...

DIGITAL MEDIA OPPORTUNITIES FOR LAWYERS IN KENYA

New disruptive technologies emerge virtually every day. Lawyers like journalists today face disruptive technology challenges. While Lawyer-client confidentiality is at the heart of their relationship journalists-source relationship is equally pegged on trust. I am sure many lawyers have encountered confidentiality problems with these technologies of the internet, smartphones and even lose of data in laptops, computers besides security breach challenges or cybercrimes. I have a few questions: What can the legal profession do to offer resources to digital journalists and members of the public to help them thrive in the wake of legal challenges? Have lawyers studied the nature of the online journalism ecosystem that enhance or inhibit its function? What opportunities exist for lawyers this ecosystem? How can they harness the same as they grow their careers and be able to represent clients effectively?

DIGITAL AND MEDIA OPPORTUNITIES FOR LAWYERS IN KENYA

§  Law firms are using high-tech services to aid their work. From your mobile phones to computers and laptops tattered files are increasingly disappearing.

§  As clients look for value for money, lawyers are increasingly aware that digital tools can also create efficiencies in their own work, speeding up previously laborious and repetitive tasks, while also serving to spotlight errors.

§  Many law firms are increasingly using digital tools and cloud-based solutions to improve their efficiency and cut costs. While the advantages of these technologies are obvious to most, some organisations remain curiously rooted in the way the industry’s computing worked five or six years ago.

§  A digital transformation can make your law firm more competitive in two ways: by saving money and creating new business opportunities.

Asset protection through data security §  In addition to collaboration tools, data security is one of the top priorities that law firms,

especially small and medium organisations, should consider when looking at their IT investments. §  Lawyers are using technology which is enabling them to provide a detailed analysis of

the key risk in mergers and acquisition deals within hours rather than what previously may have taken many expensive days.


§  There is growing problem for online speech. It manifests itself in form of a vast array of bloggers, citizen journalists, and other non-professional writers were publishing information on the Internet without a solid understanding of their rights and responsibilities under the law.

§  There is an immense opportunity for legal training and need to allocate resources to prepare the public for challenges such as defamation, privacy, and copyright claims, and often ran into pitfalls when dealing with issues such as corporate formation, contract negotiation, and development of website policies.

§  LSK and its membership should engage in public outreach efforts, including organizing conferences, making speaking appearances, publishing regular blogs and maintaining an online forum for discussion of legal issues affecting digital speech.

§  These activities had the effect of raising the public profile of LSK as an authoritative source of legal information in digital media. In short Kenya is hungry for digital lawyers.


Where your client, family member or friend ‘likes’ a comment on Facebook what does it mean in law? §  There have been claims of surveillance by government on phone data, invasion

privacy of phones §  Ethical conduct of lawyers and their clients can be easily breached courtesy of

digital technology. §  Today many of you find it difficult to handle digital evidence while at the same time

use it to pitch your cases. §  COURT HOUSE LIBRARIES; “Digital evidence is one of the great, if not the greatest,

challenges facing civil litigation.” §  Previously I would see lawyers and their court clerks loaded with huge files headed

to the courts. That is fast changing as much those torn, ugly looking files still remain a feature of our courts.


§  According COURT HOUSE LIBRARIES: Paper records once ruled Earth, but digital is the new mammal. And in the new digital environment, it's up to all lawyers to ensure that they, their clients, and the laws of evidence do not play the role of the dinosaur.

§  In storing information on digital formats, there is a great opportunity to reduce work load for lawyers and offer real time services at cheaper costs that are environment friendly.

§  With digital technology lawyers have a gapping opportunity to provide much needed services including public education and lectures from digital platforms.

§  From online consultations to strategic consulting services like company registration, administration of oath and basic information like where to find a lawyer in Machakos, Makueni, Kitui, Meru Embu etc. Members of LSK must start demanding for such services going forward.


§  Innovators are seeking patent lawyers to guide them but there is no platform where they can access information readily

§  Where can lawyers learn about research initiatives which require their inputs? §  Where are blogs by lawyers? Can we harness them either through links or through

single portal?

§  Lawyers can offer differentiated packages of business consulting and legal services that give you innovative, real-world business perspectives and solutions that will create opportunity and drive new ROI in this ever-changing and uncertain environment.

§  Can LSK help members build an online Media Network where professional exchange of ideas, consultation inquiries and best practices can reside to help members?


§  What can LSK do for victims of online invasion of privacy, victims of online harassment? Can lawyers provide critical resources including facilitating discussion of issues around online invasion of privacy?

§  Can we have defamation claims against gossip websites that are spiraling in Kenya?

§  How do we deal with anonymous contents filed on stories published by the mainstream media?

§  The big question is how many are ready to embrace this change?

SOME OPPORTUNITIES

§  Counseling §  Structuring §  Online Gaming and Lottery §  Drafting §  Negotiating complicated technology, §  Software license agreements §  Purchasing, licensing, marketing and

related commercial agreements, §  Intellectual property

§  Property agreements §  Corporate compliance §  Dispute resolution §  Investigations and intelligence reports, §  Mergers and acquisitions §  Sports contracts for super stars,

athletes, footballers etc §  Termination of contracts

MEDIA OPPORTUNITIES

§  Live Radio §  Live TV Interviews §  Opinions §  Commentaries §  Letters to the Editor

§  Libel and defamation education

§  Civic Education §  Solicited contributions etc

SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM OPPORTUNITIES §  YouTube §  Facebook §  Twitter

§  LinkedIn §  Freelancer.com

§  An Instagram post or a Facebook post: Uncharted territory for courts and journalists.The importance of user terms and agreements. How do you advise your clients and family? What do they need to know about privacy policy.

§  What can LSK and its members do to return Kenyans online to Sanity?

OPINION / Thursday, May 21, 2015 / The Standard

A dozen years later, American politics has reached a rough con-sensus about the Iraq War: It was a mistake. Politicians hoping to be president rarely run ahead of public opinion. So it’s a revealing moment when the major con-tenders for president in both par-ties find it best to say that 4,491 Americans and countless Iraqis lost their lives in a war that shouldn’t have been waged.

Many people have been say-ing that for years, of course. Polls show most of the public have judged the war a failure by now. Over time, more and more Re-publican politicians have allowed that the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq under-mined Republican President George W. Bush’s rationale for the 2003 invasion.

It hasn’t been an easy evolu-tion for those such as Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, now fa-voured to win her party’s nomina-tion, who voted for the war in 2002 while serving in the Senate. That vote, and her refusal to fully disavow it, led to the loss of the 2008 primaries to Barack Obama, who wasn’t in the Senate in 2002 but had opposed the war.

In her memoir last year, Clin-ton wrote that she had voted based on the information avail-able at the time, but “I got it wrong. Plain and simple.” What might seem a hard truth for a na-tion to acknowledge has become the safest thing for an American politician to say — even Bush’s brother.

The fact that Jeb Bush, a likely candidate for the Republican nomination in 2016, was pres-sured this past week into reject-ing, in hindsight, his brother’s war “is an indication that the received wisdom, that which we work from right now, is that this was a mis-take,” said Evan Cornog, a histo-rian and dean of the Hofstra Uni-versity school of communication.

Or as Rick Santorum, another potential Republican candidate, put it: “Everybody accepts that now.” As a senator, Santorum vot-ed for the Iraq invasion and con-tinued to support it for years.

It’s an easier question for pres-idential hopefuls who aren’t bound by family ties or their own congressional vote for the war, who have the luxury of judging it in hindsight, knowing full well the terrible price Americans paid and the continuing bloodshed in Iraq today.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz weren’t in Congress in 2002 and so didn’t have to make a real-time decision with imperfect knowledge. Nei-ther was New Jersey Governor Chris Christie or Ohio Governor John Kasich, who served an earli-er stint in Congress.

All these Republicans said last week that, in hindsight, they would not have invaded Iraq with what’s now known about the faulty intelligence that wrongly indicated Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass de-struction.

Wisconsin Governor Scott

The recent events at the Law Society of Kenya’s Annual General Meeting portrayed the LSK as a body at war with itself threatening to lead to its death row.

It appeared as if all hell had broken loose and the learned friends, according to some in the Press, had engaged in unlearned war that was threatening to tear the professional body apart.

Some have gone ahead to un-fortunately; suggest that it is a war between senior and young law-yers. That is certainly not true. First and foremost, LSK has had an illustrious and chequered history which has given it a distinct iden-tity as a society that prides itself in maintaining certain ethos that puts it at a high pedestal.

That is why the country was shocked to watch very disturbing images coming from the Annual General Meeting. Such images have been popular with county halls, union meetings and other welfare organisations. Lawyers have over the years championed decorum, civility and reasonable-ness when settling disputes.

That is why we owe it to our-selves not to tread there again. The

Soul-searching needed to redeem LSK image

We must rise as one family, reason together and find solutions for our Society in a more dignified, sober and „lawyerly“ manner

LSK was among the institutions whose leading lights played a role in the Second Liberation that led to the repeal of Section 2A of the retired Constitution and subse-quently the promulgation of the 2010 Constitution. A number of our leaders suffered. Some went to exile fearing for their lives, others were incarcerated while others were brutalised by the oppressive regimes of the past.

Even then, we did not lose our reasoning capacity and stayed to-gether. It did not matter who came from where, what age or sex.What mattered at that time was the fight for the Rule of Law, tolerance and justice.

The driving force for our mem-bers was for the betterment of the entire Kenyan Society. We must re-member that, on several occa-sions, we had running battles with the Government and the Govern-ment strove unsuccessfully to break our spirits and cause dishar-mony among us but we stayed to-gether as a united body. That is where our strength was and still is.

As a professional society we must engage in serious soul-searching, retrace our steps back and find out where the rain

started beating us. This is not the time for sabre-rattling and chest thumping histrionics that would weaken our society further. There is no war between the senior and younger members of the society. The LSK members are all equal and have equal rights.

The membership is growing every year and these are challeng-es that are expected of any rapidly growing society anywhere in the world.

The 1990 United Nations Pro-tocol on the independence of the legal profession was meant to cre-ate an environment for fostering a strong law society capable of standing for the just Rule of Law, independence of the Judiciary and constitutionalism.

These cardinal principles are very important to the people of Kenya and a weakened Law Soci-ety will have no capacity to stand and defend the people against the breach of their constitutional rights.

The LSK must therefore remain united and strong in order to con-tinue fighting for the successful implementation of the Constitu-tion and the realisation of the Bill of Rights for enjoyment of the

Kenyan people. I humbly submit therefore that infighting erodes our ability as a society to stand for the fundamental rights of our members and Kenyans.

We must therefore rise as one family, reason together and find solutions for our society in a more dignified, sober and “lawyerly” manner. We must respect one an-other and uphold each other with dignity and embrace dialogue.

That is why it is important that the society embraces the consul-tative process that the Council of the Law Society has proposed for next week to move the LSK for-ward in a responsible and struc-tured manner devoid of jingoism and intransigence.

The only ball our eyes must be focused on is the ball of a united, strong LSK.

Any person who is not interest-ed in the members of the Law So-ciety talking to each other is sure-ly not our friend.

What might seem a hard truth for a nation to acknowled-ge has become the safest thing ... even for Geor-ge Bush‘s brother

Iraq war was a mistake, 2016 hopefuls say

JAMES A. MWAMU}

CONNIE CASS}

Walker, in an interview on Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation”, summed up that sentiment: “Knowing what we know now, I think it’s safe for many of us, my-self included, to say, we probably wouldn’t have taken” that ap-proach.

Rubio, in a long exchange on “Fox News Sunday”, tried to navi-gate the Iraq shoals once again, making a glass-half-full case that while the war was based on mis-taken intelligence, the world still is better off with Saddam gone.

These politicians didn’t go as far, however, as war critics such as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a de-clared Republican candidate, who says it would have been a mistake even if Saddam were hiding such weapons. Paul says Saddam was serving as a counterbalance to Iran and removing him from pow-er led to much of the turmoil now rocking the Middle East.

Former President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, still maintain that ousting a brutal and unpredictable dicta-tor made the world safer.

In his 2010 memoir, “Decision Points,” Bush said he got a “sicken-ing feeling” every time he thought about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and he knew that would “transform public per-ception of the war”. But he stands by his decision. The war remains a painful topic that politicians must approach with some care.

Jeb Bush, explaining his reluc-tance to clarify his position on the war’s start, said “going back in time

and talking about hypotheticals,” the would-haves and the should-haves, does a disservice to the families of soldiers who gave their lives.

When he finished withdrawing US troops in December 2011, Obama predicted a stable, self-re-liant Iraqi government would take hold. Instead, turmoil and terror-ism overtook Iraq and American leaders and would-be presidents are struggling with what to do next.

The US now has 3,040 troops in Iraq as trainers and advisers and to provide security for American per-sonnel and equipment.

For the most part, the public and the military — like the politi-cians — are focused less on deci-sions of the past than on the events of today and how to stop the Is-lamic State militants who have overrun a swath of Iraq and in-spired terrorist attacks in the West. “The greater amount of angst in the military is from seeing the manifest positive results of the surge in 2007 and 2008 go to waste by misguided policies in the after-math,” said retired US Army Colo-nel Peter Monsoor, a top assistant to General David Petraeus in Bagh-dad during that increase of US troops in Iraq.

“Those mistakes were huge and compounded the original er-ror of going into Iraq in the first place,” said Monsoor, now a pro-fessor of military history at Ohio State University.

-Associated Press

Mr Mwamu is the immediate

former President of the East Africa

Law Society. He is currently a

Council Member of the Law

Society of Kenya

OBAMA SUCCESSION

What is it that women really want? They went to Beijing demanding all sorts of rights and got them. Today the girl child has eclipsed the boy child; turning him into a parasitic sissy hiding behind Mama‘s skirts even at 30! Funny, they do not like it one bit! They are complaining again. Is this what happens when the neck out grows the head; jug ears and all? [email protected]

PalaverA British newspaper, The Daily Mirror, reports that the white widow whose real name is Samantha Lewthwaite masterminded the Garissa University attack. She has been into Kenya several times and our security forces get to know about it only after she leaves. Ethiopian forces drive 16 kilometres inside Kenya, occupy a police station and leave at their own pleasure! Joseph Nkais-sery, Kenyans demand safety. Can you justify your salary to them?

According to most Kenyans who expressed their views on radio stations across the country, an opinion poll that ranked Senators and put John Lonyangapuo of West Pokot County at the top is suspect! How could that be where people die often and cattle theft is a favourite pass time? Oh no, just imagine! But with the fratricidal wars in Narok, can we fault the polls for placing the Narok Senator at number 36? A Palaver reader comments: „while other counties are building, he wants to bring his down, amazing really.“

Money, Money! Money! They say it has a way of making the worst ene-mies out of the best of friends. And, in case you forgot, the stuff landed Jesus on the damned cross. Word has it that there is trouble brewing up at one of the hugely funded State corporations over the control of funds supposedly sourced by the line CS and the CEO of the organi-sation. Interesting times lie ahead. But for the asking, who really should control the funds?

According to most Kenyans who expressed their views on radio sta-tions across the country, an opini-on poll that ranked Senators and put John Lonyanga-puo of West Pokot County at the top is suspect! How could that be where people die often and cattle theft is a favourite pass time? Oh no, just imagine! But with the fratricidal wars in Narok, can we fault the polls for placing the Narok Senator at number 36? A Palaver reader comments: „while other counties are building, he wants to bring his down, amazing really.“

The Standard Newspaper 21st May, 2015 - OPED

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digital media opportunities for lawyers in kenyalsk.or.ke/downloads/digital media - david...

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