Army Post Road

     Michael Arrington from TechCrunch has an entry entitled Somebody Needs To Stop This about how a bankruptcy court in California is making public all the confidential records of a now-defunct Silicon Valley law firm that represented some of the most infamous names of the Dot.Com boom. All of the companies records, all of them will be made public in some fashion. Clients can choose to “opt-out” of the deal and only have their records available at the National Archives on a limited basis. Everyone else, everyone who either chooses to “opt-in” or fails to indicate a choice, will have all of their records made fully available to the public via a University of Maryland and National Archives program.
     How on Earth does any judge anywhere in the country see this as a permissible exception to the attorney-client privilege? Why are all these records, by default, going to go on display unless these clients act to shield them? Why are privileged documents crucial to the historical record of the Dot.Com Era? Since the thing that marked the era the most distinctively was the new technology it spawned and the financial upheaval it launched, all of which are either preserved for posterity by public products or public records, why do we need to wrench judicial procedure and rules for this project?