Ontario Superior Court Master Ronna Brott delivered a number of helpful tips for lawyers on how to handle their clients’ Facebook profiles at a recent Ontario Bar Association Institute insurance law debate.  The tips, reported in the post Facebook: what will your client’s profile reveal?  by  Kendyl Sebesta, (via Legal Feeds Blog on February 10, 2012) include:

• Explain to clients what they can and can’t do on Facebook, and more importantly what they should and shouldn’t be doing within the context of their case, particularly in terms of what personal information may and may not be produced in court.
• Tell clients to set every aspect of their Facebook profile to the highest possible privacy settings, and make sure they actually do so.
• Make sure you do your job and really investigate every aspect of your plaintiff’s digital profile and make sure you are educated about what could be producible in court.

​The following recent Ontario Superior Court decisions have touched on the topic of privileged communications between lawyers and their clients:

•  Pottruff v. Don Berry Holdings Inc., 2012 ONSC 311 (CanLII) – in which the Court ordered that copies of stolen communications between a lawyer and his client were privileged and must be returned to the lawyer and deleted from the computer where the documents were stored.   In considering the issues, the Court stated that “…the administration of justice would be brought into disrepute if those who wrongfully and intentionally obtained documents could then use them to their advantage in civil law suits.”
• Humberplex v. TransCanada Pipelines, 2011 ONSC 4815 (CanLII) – in which the Court found that internal corporate communications that were merely copied to in-house counsel were not the subject of solicitor-client privilege and set out that: 

CLIA, in conjunction with the CBA's Legal Profession Assistance Conference and the National Law Practice Management and Technology Section is presenting the live webinar Trends in Law Practice Management – Calculating the Risks on February 28, 2012.  Register soon for this program that will provide you with a practical overview of cloud computing, online law practice and unbundling of legal services and will equip you with tools to reduce the risk and identify the questions you need to ask in considering adopting these practice strategies. 
Whether you’re able to attend the program or not, you may also want to read:

• Technology Practice Tips – Cloud Computing published by the Law Society of Upper Canada
• Report of the Cloud Computing Working Group published by the Law Society of British Columbia
• Cloud Computing – Advice for the Profession published by the Law Society of Scotland