Social media, constitutional convention highlights of annual meeting

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Social media and a possible New York State constitutional convention are the two main topics of the Presidential Summit on Wednesday, during the annual meeting of the New York State Bar Association taking place this week in New York City.

The Presidential Summit will be held Wednesday at the New York Hilton Midtown in Manhattan. It’s the centerpiece of the week-long event expected to attract more than 4,000 lawyers.

Social media is a featured topics because Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and other platforms are considered major factors in the future practice of law. The program will delve into mining social media for evidence, juror research and attorney marketing and using social media while still complying with rules of professional conduct.

“We’re going to be talking about use of social media in attorney advertising and marketing,” said Association president David P. Miranda, who practices law in Albany. “We’re going to talk about social media use in litigation, use as evidence at trial, and also in researching jury pools.

“Social media has been around for years, but the use by attorneys is something that has a lot of balancing between the use of social media and current rules of professional responsibility and ethics and evidence that are already in place,” he said.

Ari Kaplan, a legal analyst and author of “Reinventing Professional Services: Building Your Business in the Digital Marketplace,” will deliver a keynote address about using social media. Kaplan will moderate a panel discussion with Ganfer & Shore partner Mark A. Berman, Rochester attorney Nicole Black, and journalist Casey Sullivan.

Black, a Daily Record columnist, blogger, and technology evangelist for MyCase Inc., said many lawyers are just catching on to the use of social media.

“I think it’s still a learning curve,” Black said.

“The only thing that made them start to pay attention to it was when it was actually being used in their cases. Even so, a lot of them don’t understand the platforms and they’re not sure what they can or can’t do. I think a lot of them still aren’t necessarily using social media and that’s why there’s so much interest in these panels,” Black said.

Social media posts can be an important source of information that might contradict testimony in court. And posts by jurors during a trial could potentially lead to a mistrial.

“It’s something lawyers really want to understand because their adversaries are using it and they realize that they need to understand it better,” Black said.

June Castellano, a Brighton lawyer, will be on a separate social media and ethics panel for the young lawyers section.

“The program is going to cover attorneys use of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, a variety of what’s out there now for lawyers,” Castellano said.

“There’s a lot of areas around social media where the ethics considerations do have gray areas, so the (panel) will be addressing those areas, as well, and giving best practice tips,” she said.

Later in the afternoon on Wednesday the focus will shift to the topic of a possible New York State constitutional convention. A clause in the state constitution mandates a statewide referendum every 20 years asking whether to hold a convention to revise the constitution and amend it. That question will be on the ballot Nov. 7, 2017.

The program about the potential impact that a constitutional convention might have on the legal profession and the public will feature a panel discussion moderated by Henry Greenberg, chair of the Association’s Committee on the New York State Constitution. The panelists will include Gerald Benjamin, professor at State University of New York at New Paltz, Columbia Law School professor Richard Briffault, and former New York state Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch.

“The New York State Constitution is something that affects the lives of New Yorkers every day, and certainly attorneys in many different areas of practice are impacted by the New York Constitution, from how we fund our municipalities to how we educate our children to how we protect our Adirondack Park to how our court system is structured. All of that is covered by the New York State Constitution,” Miranda said.