Privacy Presentations Galore!

Phew! It has been a busy week. I flew back from Vancouver on Monday and hit the ground running. I gave four presentation this week, all of which are available for download for anyone who is interested.

• New regulations and document retention
  
• Privacy and Atlantic Canadian Businesses: Lessons from the first year of Canada's privacy law
  
• Private Sector Privacy Laws and Public Bodies: Presentation to Public Bodies Privacy Workshop hosted by the Nova Scotia Department of Justice and the FOIPOP Review Officer
  
• Privacy Laws and Security: Presentation to the High Technology Crime Investigations Association

I think I only have one presentation next week, but it's in Toronto. I'm getting too scared to look at my calendar, these days ...

Presentation for the Halifax Business Community

Today, National Privacy Services and McInnes Cooper co-hosted a half-day program on lessons learned from the first year of PIPEDA's full implementation in the private sector. I kicked off the program with an overview of PIPEDA and what it's all about. Then, Heather Black, the Assistant Privacy Commissioner of Canada, provided some very interesting insights on trends that her office is seeing (complaints are up 50%, a smaller portion of complaints are determined to be well-founded than last year). Heather gave her presentation "without a net", but mine is available here.

Privacy and Public Libraries

Last week, I gave a presentation to a group of directors of public libraries in Nova Scotia. Library staff are regularly called upon to consider privacy issues, particularly in connection with public use internet stations. Police regularly ask for information related to who was using a particular terminal at a particular time, often in connection with threats made or other allegedely illegal conduct. In addition, some libraries are contemplating offering reading suggestions based on reader preferences, a form of "data mining".

PIPEDA applies in Nova Scotia and public libraries are not, by and large, engaged in commercial activities. While they were interested in PIPEDA, most of the discussion related to privacy best practices they can adopt to meet the growing expectation of their users. The presentation is available here: Privacy and Public Libraries

Privacy and Insurance Claims

I was recently invited by the Canadian Bar Association - Nova Scotia's Insurance Law subsection to give a presentation on privacy laws and insurance claims, focusing on where we are now that PIPEDA has been in force for almost two years. The two principal themes were video surveillance and access to the claims file. You can download a pdf of the presentation here if you are interested: Privacy and Insurance Claims.

Privacy and Investigations

This morning, I gave a presentation on privacy and investigations by professional regulators as part of an InfoNex conference on professional regulation and discipline. A PDF of the materials are
here for all who may be interested.

Privacy in the healthcare milieu

On Thursday night, I had the pleasure of giving a presentation alongside Nancy Milford (of the Nova Scotia Health
Organizations Protective Assoc.) to the Nova Scotia Medical-Legal Society on issues related to consent and the release of
patient information. The group is composed of lawyers and medical professionals who have an interest in health law. Almost
all of them had very interesting questions on how PIPEDA is being applied (and should be applied) in the healthcare context.
If you're interested in a copy of the materials, send me an e-mail at david.fraser@mcinnescooper.com.

Liability and Pharmacy Practice

I've been invited to speak on October 30 at the Fall Refresher for the Nova Scotia College of Pharmacists on privacy liability and pharmacy practice. The brochure for the full, two-day event is available here. If you are interested in the presentation materials, e-mail me at david.fraser@mcinnescooper.com.

Presentation: Privacy and The Customer Care Sector

I was invited to give a presentation today on the effect of privacy laws on the call centre industry to ContactNB, the industry association for New Bunswick. The presentation is available here: Contact NB: Privacy and The Customer Care Sector

IT Project Management: The Legal Perspective

Other than privacy (which is overwhelmingly the majority of my practice), I'm also an IT/technology lawyer. Before PIPEDA and the emergence of privacy as a legal discipline, IT took up all of my practice. In light of this, I was kindly invited by the Project Management Institute to give a presentation of the legal perspective of IT project management, which I did today.

I have seen far too many technology projects go completely sideways because there was no legal input in advance or because the contract was drafted by a software engineer and "legal" is called in after the development is complete to review the poorly drafted (or completely inappropriate) agreement the day before they plan to sign it. Aargh. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

The presentation is available here, for anyone who may be interested: IT Project Management: The Legal Perspective.

Presentation to Meeting Professionals International

On January 13, 2005, I led a roundtable discussion on privacy laws for the Ottawa chapter of Meeting Professionals International. The focus was on how those in the event planning industry should approach privacy laws. The event itself had a very interesting format: there were more than a dozen tables going at the same time, each on a different topic. Attendees signed up for their preferred choice when they arrived. Infolink, one of the sponsors, prepared a precis of each roundtable, including mine, which is available here.

As one would expect, the meeting was amazingly well planned....

Legal conflicts for bloggers

Off topic, but ...

This past week, a colleague and I gave a presentation on blogs and blogging to the Halifax Association of Law Librarians. We covered the usual topics, including an overview of some of the good legal blogs out there, RSS, aggregators, etc.

But I also talked about an issue that has been a concern to me since I started this blog but I really haven't heard any discussion of it among the dozens of legal blogs that I follow: conflicts and blogging. Legal ethics say that a lawyer can't reveal the identity of a client or do anything that may be prejudicial to a client, except with the client's consent. See Rule 22 of the Nova Scotia Legal Ethics and Professional Conduct Handbook.

In this blog, I usually post about articles and incidents of interest that have a privacy angle. If I see an article or another blog post that deals with privacy, I'll post a link to it. I hope that this blog is "one stop shopping" for everything of interest related to Canadian privacy law. But it simply can't be. From time to time, a story hits the media that involves a client of my firm. Also, from time to time, I'll get a call from someone in the media asking to comment on a privacy story that involves a client. I always decline to link to the story or to make the comment. Unless I have the client's OK. (Which I've gotten from time to time, particularly if the result of the matter is public knowledge.)

It is a real challenge and something to be very mindful of. I work in a firm with almost 200 lawyers, with six offices in four jurisdictions. We also are Atlantic Canadian counsel to many of the largest companies operating in North America. Our securities group does agency work on behalf of loads of public companies that require registration in Atlantic Canada. If a lawyer in one of our New Brunswick offices does work for the Canadian subsidiary of a huge insurance company, that company is a client and I have to keep my mouth shut. Even if it may be borderline or in a grey area, I have to err on the side of caution.

I would be very interested to hear the thoughts of other legal bloggers out there on this topic. I think this is an important topic that could bear some informed discussion.

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UPDATE:

I solicited Alan Gahtan's thoughts on this subject, which he has posted on Gahtan's Technology and Internet Law Blog:

"My view is that lawyers who publish, whether through a blog or through more traditional print media, operate under a disability. They must not disclose client confidences and must not advocate a position that is contrary to their client’s interests. The magnitude of the disability is proportionate to the size of the firm that a particular lawyer practices with since conflicts are “shared” among the lawyers of a firm. It is less of a problem when the lawyer’s publishing activities involve ad hoc articles as opposed to the operation of a website or blog that tries to cover all developments in a particular area. I’m not a legal ethics expert but my view is that simply reporting other information that is already public should not create a legal conflict (although I can see that it could create a business conflict with a particular client). However, it does mean that the blogging lawyer will be limited in their ability to comment on a particular news item if such comment would be detrimental to the interest of a client of the firm. It likely also means that any third party comments will also need to be filtered so that they do not contain any content that is detrimental to any such client. "

I like the use of the term that we lawyers are blogging "under a disability." Our hands our tied and our lips are always sealed, but this isn't unique to the blogging environment. Lawyers always have very juicy gossip but have to keep their mouths closed at cocktail parties. Blogging lawyers also have to be mindful not to aliente present and prospective clients with their blog content. I try to be as even-handed and balanced as possible, with the minimum of personal and political opinion (which is distinct from professional opinion).

There have been a number of times when I've had to remain silent when clients have appeared in the news, even though I have no immediate knowledge of the incident (for example, if its US branch is in the news). There have also been cases when the clients have had positive privacy-related publicity, but it is not my place to speak for or about them without permission. But when it does not inovolve a client, I think I am free to link to public information even though my firm has clients in the same industry with similar business issues.

Thanks Alan, Rob, David and DP Thinker for the comments, above and below.

Technorati tags: legal ethics :: blogging :: blogs :: lawyers :: legal profession

Privacy Law and Workplace Investigations: Workshop

I spent the day today with Paul Bradley, VP of PricewaterhouseCoopers, giving a workshop for Insight Information on conducting workplace investigations in the new era of privacy regulation. Anyone who is interested can get a copy of my powerpoint presentation here: Privacy Law and Workplace Investigations: Workshop