In Search of Cyberlawyers

Computerworld - Hardly a day goes by that Robert Thomas doesn't need legal advice. "Nowadays, you can hardly blink without consulting an attorney," says Thomas, CIO at Matrix Direct Inc., a discount insurance marketer in San Diego.
That's because his company's business processes are also its main source of intellectual property, which makes application upgrades, development and rollouts legally problematic. For example, if Thomas wanted to save $100 per hour and ship some of the company's application development to India, he says he would fret because there are no guarantees that those overseas developers wouldn't sell the application to competitors.
But cyberattorneys are hard to come by, Thomas says. Even with lawyers on retainer, he often waits days - even weeks - for a return phone call. Those delays, he says, hold up production that's vital to his company's growth.
"The paradigm here is ease of access to information and data. The ease and speed of access - and the ability to easily copy and reuse someone else's intellectual property - has created an exponential increase in business," explains Larry Zanger, head of the information technology and e-commerce practice group at McBride, Baker and Coles (MBC), a law firm in Chicago.
"Intellectual property, e-business contracts and even e-business consolidation are very rich areas for lawyers because there are all types of issues people don't even think about when starting a dot-com," he continues.
Thus, the dot-com boom has created yet another labor shortage, this time in the legal community.
Legal 'Skills Gap'
Sounding like an IT recruiter, Zanger claims that his company has increased salaries, sweetened hiring packages and shortened the time needed to reach partner status in order to recruit the attorneys his firm needs.
"Because of the increase in general business created by the Internet explosion, good lawyers are in as short a supply as good IT people are," Zanger adds.
In the past three years, MBC has increased staff 10% just to keep up with clients' demands. As with dot-com start-ups, most of the new hires at MBC are twentysomethings straight out of college. But now, instead of getting paid $90,000 to $95,000 per year to research case histories, they're starting out at $140,000 and getting immediate face time with young dot-com entrepreneurs.
Suddenly, the law firm has 26-year-old attorneys cutting deals for 23-year-old dot-com entrepreneurs, adds Zanger, 53, who has practiced computer law longer than most of his new hires have been alive. "It's frightening," he jests.
Cyberattorneys work in areas of electronic business development such as business