Blog of law articles

What a crazy morning, how about you?

Note to hipster ahead of me in line at the Starbucks by the Courthouse on Flagler this morning -- you do not look "cool" in your ironic fedora, particularly when you are ordering a mocha frappachino. Man up, dude.

Anyways, what do you all think of Blackberry addicts who are busy screwing around on their smartphones at depositions, meetings, and even in the courthouse?

Are you being rude or merely multi-tasking when you are playing breakout on your phone during a boring deposition:

As Web-enabled smartphones have become standard on the belts and in the totes of executives, people in meetings are increasingly caving in to temptation to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, even (shhh!) ESPN.com.

But a spirited debate about etiquette has broken out. Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril.

In Hollywood, both the Creative Artists Agency and United Talent Agency ban BlackBerry use at meetings. Tom Golisano, a billionaire and power broker in New York State politics, said last week that he pushed to remove Malcolm A. Smith as the State Senate majority leader after the senator met with him on budget matters in April and spent the time reading e-mail on his BlackBerry.

The phone use has become routine in the corporate and political worlds — and grating to many. A third of more than 5,300 workers polled in May by Yahoo HotJobs, a career research and job listings Web site, said they frequently checked e-mail in meetings. Nearly 20 percent said they had been castigated for poor manners regarding wireless devices.

Despite resistance, the etiquette debate seems to be tilting in the favor of smartphone use, many executives said. Managing directors do it. Summer associates do it. It spans gender and generation, private and public sectors.

A few years ago, only “the investment banker types” would use BlackBerrys in meetings, said Frank Kneller, the chief executive of a company in Elk Grove Village, Ill., that makes water-treatment systems. “Now it’s everybody.” He said that if he spotted 6 of 10 colleagues tapping away, he knew he had to speed up his presentation.

Personally I think some latitude should be shown to lawyers who use their smartphones to stay in touch with the office and respond to emails from opposing counsel and so forth. The device is one of the reasons the lawyer is able to be out of the office in the first place.

But in court it's a definite no-no -- you should really leave and go outside to tap away, and in face-to-face meetings I think maybe once or twice during a lunch might be ok but checking every five minutes makes you look like a fidgety schmuck.