Navigating the tech minefield: committees examine cloud computing, e-filing, and the use of metatags.

It's one thing to store your downloaded digital music or e-books "in the cloud," but is it a safe place to stash confidential client information? Likewise, if the Internet guru you hired to manage your firm website wants to add some "invisible" words, could that be a problem?

The Bar Board of Governors, at its July 27 meeting, approved drafting advisory opinions on those three subjects to help lawyers avoid unexpected ethical detonations in the technology minefields.

The three requests to issue proposed opinions were presented by the Board Review Committee on Professional Ethics. BRCPE Chair Carl Schwait said the committee voted unanimously in all three instances to recommend the advisory opinions be drafted.

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The cloud computing issue came to the board from the Professional Ethics Committee (see story in the August 1 Bar News), which asked the board to draft an advisory opinion on that topic. (Under Bar policies, the committee can only draft opinions on questions brought by lawyers or at the direction of the Board of Governors.)

Cloud computing is when companies offer offsite storage for digital information, which users can access with a variety of computers, smart phones, tablets, and similar devices anywhere they have Internet access. It can also relieve users of the need to buy and maintain more computer memory capability as well as provide offsite backup for critical information.

But, as Schwait told the board, questions have arisen on how secure such stored information is.

"The use of cloud computing ... presents confidentiality concerns and becomes a very big topic on issues of what happens in the cloud, is there confidentiality, and things such as that," he said. "Having gotten so many questions, the Professional Ethics Committee has come forward, and they would like to have you issue a directive that they look at it, come for a formal determination about it, and send it back to us."

Metatags involve efforts to make websites get higher placements in the results of Internet search engines. Metatags are typically words or phrases that are invisible to viewers of the site, but are picked up by the search engines. Words are made invisible by setting the font size at zero or making the type the same color as the website background.

Search engine companies typically discourage the use of metatags, including the blacklisting of practitioners from any search results, but the practice has continued. There have been...