Jim Bell Trial: Second Day

[Bill Stewart]

At 10:30 AM 04/06/2001 +0100, Ken Brown wrote:
> > The next witness was Hilda Wong Muramoto who is a subpoena manager for 
> @Home
>...
>"subpoena manager"? What in Tacoma is a "subpoena manager"? Do subpoenas
>need managing?
>It sounds like they employ someone just to get sued.  Presumably that
>means she is a PR clone or a lawyer. Why should a PR type know anything
>about DNS & SMTP, any more than I (or Choate)  should be an expert on
>the law?

Any large company, particularly in the telecom business,
gets lots of subpoenas, lawsuits, etc., and it makes sense to have
somebody in their corporate legal department who's the front end
for managing that sort of thing.  Telecom companies not only
have regulatory issues that generate lots of paperwork,
sometimes initiated by the company, sometimes by governments,
and sometimes by third parties (often the competition),
but they also have lots of trucks and backhoes digging up streets,
which leads to whole rafts of opportunities for lawyers :-)

A particularly special case is wiretap requests and similar
demands for information about customers.  You *don't* want those to be
handled by some random droid - you want them to be handled by a
lawyer who's got lots of clue about what kinds of requests are legal,
what are non-supportable fishing expeditions, where the boundaries are,
what to do with requests that might divulge information about non-named 
parties,
and how to find the right people in the <huge disorganized bureaucracy>
to deal with any requests that they are going to honor.
Ideally, you'd want this lawyer to be a junkyard dog 
too-cranky-for-the-ACLU type,
rather than someone who rolls over if asked nicely,
but there's also a lot of need for responding to subpoenas for
billing records in civil disputes where you'd expect the carrier to respond.