What's Next: Web of Lawyers

Tweet

You don't need to put up a website for the Web to bring out the worst in someone else's lawyers. Employees with Internet access can do it for you. We all know that an employee who openly surfs pornography sites can get a company sued for sexual harassment. Less commonly known is that getting rid of an employee who ignores warnings to stop viewing sexually explicit material on the Web may be an even better way to get sued. IBM (NYSE:IBM) learned that in February when it was hit with a $5 million lawsuit by a dismissed employee who claimed the company should have instead offered him treatment for being addicted to Internet sex. And forget the sex--just being addicted to plain old Web surfing will soon become the stuff of a new wave of employee lawsuits, predicts Gayle Porter, an associate professor at Rutgers Business School. "Many employees are becoming consumed with technology to the detriment of the rest of their lives," Porter says. "And some of them are going to turn around and say they have psychological or health problems because of it, and then they're going to look for someone to blame." Suing employers for enabling their harmful overattachment to computers, she says, is no more improbable than suing a tobacco company for promoting smoking or suing a fast-food company for encouraging unhealthful eating.

If all that has you thinking you might want to monitor employees' Web-surfing habits to watch for signs of addiction, make sure you don't extend the policy to any employees in Canada and Europe, where you can be slammed by regulations that limit electronically peering over an employee's shoulder. If you do end up firing an employee, try to get his or her name off your website in short order--failure to do so got a Connecticut business sued in 2005. And avoid giving employees the bad news over a cell phone while they're driving, given that at least a dozen companies have been sued over blabbing-while-driving accidents.

What can you do to lower your legal exposure in this lawsuit-happy world? A good start would be to run your website and Web-related employee policies past a lawyer who specializes in Internet law. Unfortunately, most lawyers aren't yet up to speed on this stuff. That's what Bob Reno, who chronicles the misadventures of athletes at his website BadJocks.com, discovered when he received an eight-page contract from a large corporation that wanted to buy a domain name from him. "My lawyer just shook his head and said he had no idea what to make of it," recalls Reno, who was ultimately warned off of signing the contract by Clarke Douglas Walton, a Las Vegas-based attorney whose practice is focused entirely on Internet-related law. Walton, who founded the popular casino poker information website AllVegasPoker.com while in law school (he still runs it and has yet to be sued by a casino), notes that many website owners fail to even take the basic step of throwing up a "terms of service" statement that specifies which state's courts would have jurisdiction over any related lawsuits.

But Walton also is fond of pointing out that Web law cuts both ways. "Usually when an entrepreneur first contacts me it's because he's received a threatening letter from a larger company," he says. "But given how fast Internet companies can grow, it's only a year or two before they're the ones sending the cease-and-desist letters to a smaller Web company." That's paying it forward in the Internet era.

Contributing editor David H. Freedman (whatsnext@inc.com) is a Boston-based author of several books about business and technology.

 PREV  1 | 2 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Technology Newsletter

Email Address: