Yahoo! Let My E-mail Go!

The September Ball in Your Court column from Law Technology News:

By Craig Ball

A voice came from on high and said unto me, "Go forth and harvest the clouds." Well, not a voce in excelsis exactly, but a court order directing I gather up parties' webmail.

The task seemed simple enough: The litigants would surrender their login credentials, and I'd collect and process their messages for relevance while segregating for privilege review.

Their data lived "in the cloud," and considering its celestial situation, I might have taken a cue from Ecclesiastes 11:4: "Whoever looks at the clouds shall not reap." So it was, I nearly got smote — not by Yahweh but by Yahoo! Cloud computing refers to web-based tools and resources that supplant local applications and storage. It's called "the cloud" because of the cloud-shaped icon used to signify the internet in network schematics.

Read the rest here.