The 2015-2016 Miami-Dade FAWL elections concluded on Friday, April 17, 2015.  Voter turnout was high, with over 43 percent of members casting ballots.   

Congratulations to the incoming Miami-Dade FAWL Officers and Directors, all of whom will be installed at the 35th Annual Installation and Award Dinner on Thursday, June 18, 2015, at Jungle Island.    

On April 17, 2015, Miami-Dade FAWL's Platinum Sponsor, FTI Consulting, presented a continuing legal education program entitled Whiplash: What are Visual Analytics and How Can They Accelerate Discovery and Fact-Finding?  The presentation, made by Brian Ramos, Business Development Director, and Beth Ashley, Review Manager, of FTI Consulting was extremely informative.  The presenters provided insights into an ever growing problem that lawyers face in litigation - increased data volume and tighter budgets to cover discovery.  By utilizing new visual analytics (or information visualization tools) to locate, better understand and act upon important information, lawyers can react faster and save money in the discovery process.  Specific recommendations to the attendees included the use of predictive coding to sort e-data and other tools to display the data.  For those lawyers who still have a fear of using analytic tools like predictive coding, Brian and Beth pointed out that a number of recent opinions substantiate the validity and reliability of their use.  This event, held at Colson Hicks Eidson, was the first of a three-part CLE series on e-discovery related issues that Miami-Dade FAWL will be hosting in connection with FTI Consulting.  If you participate in e-discovery in your practice, we highly recommend that you attend the next CLE in this invaluable series, Guardians of the E-Discovery Galaxy: How to Fully Leverage the Human Part of Human Review, on Wednesday, May 20th at the FTI Consulting Managed Review Center, 1 Biscayne Tower, 2 S. Biscayne Blvd. 18th Floor.  

Back row: Kristy Johnson, Candace Duff, Deborah Baker-Egozi, Janeen Lofton, Stephanie Chaissan, Christine Gudaitis, Colleen Grady, and Sherril Colombo; Front row: Stacey Soloff, Ileana Cruz, Alice Sum, Linda Ebin-Levine, Sheila Oretsky, Diana Mendez, and Shelley Kravitz

On April 8, 2015, the Miami-Dade FAWL Corporate Counsel Liaison Committee hosted a lunch in the Miami Design District with Linda Ebin, the General Counsel of Dacra, a real estate company.  Much of Miami's rapid growth in recent years can be attributed to the vision of Dacra and its transformation of the Miami Design District. It takes a team to build a sought after destination and Ms. Ebin, a former private practice attorney who has been at Dacra since 2007, spent time revealing her expectations of her outside legal team during the lunch.  Ms. Ebin graciously gave practice pointers to the attendees from an in-house perspective.  What is most important to Ms. Ebin is reliability.  Ms. Ebin understands her role to be more of that as a manager and expects a legal team that provides her with timely advice and guidance and, most importantly, a final product.  In her demanding role, Ms. Ebin finds it hard to find time to revise legal documents and appreciates unwavering direction and solid work product. Being responsive is also important to Ms. Ebin. However, Ms. Ebin pointed out that there is a fine line between being responsive and inundating your client with emails.  Ms. Ebin cautioned that emails stating "you're welcome" or smiley face responses should be used sparingly as they can quickly saturate an inbox that is already full. 

The Corporate Counsel Liaison Committee is grateful to Dacra and Linda Ebin for hosting the members only lunch at their high-design office space in the Miami Design District.  True to its location and the company's vision, the Dacra offices display of art would satisfy any aesthete.

To be a part of the Committee's next Table for 8 with General Counsel of Elizabeth Arden, and for information about other upcoming Miami-Dade FAWL events, visit our website.

Author of Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, Danielle Citron

This year, Miami-Dade FAWL has focused a lot of its attention on the issue of "revenge porn." But it is important to understand that cyber-harassment is not limited to the nonconsensual distribution of sexually explicit images. Instead, online harassment incorporates many types of online abuse, revenge porn being just one of them. It is true, though, that revenge porn disproportionately targets women.

Professor Danielle Citron is the Lois K. Macht Research Professor & Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, where she focuses on information privacy, cyber law, automated systems, and civil rights. In 2014, she authored Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, which was nominated by Cosmopolitan and Harper's Bazaar as one of the year's top 20 "Best Moments for Women."  Hate Crimes in Cyberspace has received national recognition and remarkable accolades from many prominent scholars and individuals, including authors, lawyers, and journalists.

By way of example, Robin West, Frederick J. Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy at Georgetown Law, had this to say:

"Danielle Citron's Hate Crimes in Cyberspace is a breakthrough book. It has been compared, and with good reason, to Catherine MacKinnon's Sexual Harassment of Working Women. The book makes three major contributions. All are central to furthering the equality of women and men both in cyberspace and elsewhere. The book thus serves as a blueprint for what Citron insightfully calls a new civil rights movement. It gives legal representatives and victims a roadmap for charting out legal actions that can be taken to halt the abuse being currently suffered, and to compensate for past harms. It gives state and federal legislators a menu of options for strengthening the law in this area, so that cyberspace can be a safe as well as robust domain for the expression of views on all subjects. It responds to First Amendment worries about the possibility that her proposed reforms might chill valuable speech, and it suggests paths for interested private parties who want to affect the trajectory here outside the law. It's a tour de force and I believe it will succeed. It will change the law, change the conversation, and change attitudes toward and regarding this extraordinarily abusive and harmful behavior. It will strengthen women's civil rights, and thus strengthen women's equality and at core, it will be a significant step toward ensuring women's safety in the public space of employment and education, as well as in cyberspace and the home. This is a book to celebrate, to study, to argue over, and, mostly, to use."

Erwin Chemerinsky, a renowned constitutional law scholar and the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law of the University of California, Irvine School of Law commented:

"Citron...focuses on how online hate speech ruins lives, most often women's lives. She cites surveys that show that 60 to 70 percent of cyberstalking victims are women, and she details cases in which women have been targeted, defamed, and threatened with rape and murder...The very same things that make the Internet such a uniquely powerful medium for freedom of speech make it a uniquely powerful medium for hate crimes...The difficult question--as always in First Amendment and most constitutional litigation--is where to draw the line. In grappling with that and offering provisional answers, Citron [does] a great service."

Professor Citron coined the phrase "Cyber Civil Rights," which comes from an article of the same name published by the Boston University Law Review in January 2009. She originally posted the piece on SSRN in 2008. Therein, Professor Citron argued that online harassment should be understood as a civil rights violation and the piece articulated a legal agenda to address it. That written work and two others, Law's Expressive Value in Combating Cyber Gender Harassment, 108 MICH. L. REV. 373 (2009), and Intermediaries and Hate Speech," 91 B.U. L. REV. 1435 (2011) (with Helen Norton), gave life to the project, which ultimately became Hate Crimes in Cyberspace.

Because the name truly fit, Holly Jacobs asked permission to use the "Cyber Civil Rights" name as the name for her organization, the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. Humbled and honored, Professor Citron agreed. Later, the Cyber Civil Rights Legal Project also asked to use the name for its pro bono project to help victims of "revenge porn," a "cyber civil rights" violation. Today, both organizations are named after Professor Citron's original work. Professor Citron has expressed her admiration for the work of the Cyber Civil Rights Legal Project and the lawyers who are putting the ideas in her book into practice, making them meaningful through their representation of clients, and working with policy makers.

Professor Citron frequently writes for the Atlantic, New York Times, Time, CNN, the Guardian, the New Scientist, and Slate, and she is a regular contributor at Forbes.com and Concurring Opinions. In addition to teaching and authoring books and articles, among other things, she serves as an advisor to California Attorney General Kamala Harris's Task Force Against Cyber Exploitation and the American Law Institute's Restatement, Third.

Have something to share?  Email thoughts and comments to lara.bach@weil.com.