Top Google Lawyer to Counterparts: Tear Down Silos to Recognize ‘Info Law,’ Work Collaboratively

SAN FRANCISCO -- The legal system must recognize information law as a cohesive field crossing several traditional doctrines and the world’s many jurisdictions, to lay a good foundation for a long era of new rules supporting innovation, said Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel. “If you get that foundation wrong, the house is going to go off in a funky direction,” he said at the Corporate Counsel West Coast Conference. And in-house lawyers should stop being largely naysayers and become agents of change with regulators and those at other companies in addition to within their own, he said.

Information law is increasingly important as a concept, in recognition that digital technologies raise profound, unavoidable legal questions crossing historical issue silos and calling for answers that established law can’t readily supply, Walker said late Wednesday. The use of browsers, search engines and online auctions all raised what could have been severe legal problems, he said. The point was brought home by an Italian prosecutor’s statement to Google executives in a YouTube case that the Internet should be governed by the same rules as TV, he said, calling that “a crazy concept."

"The Internet is somewhat sui generis,” unique, Walker said. TV is one-to-many. Telephony is one-to-one. The Internet is “a many-to-many network in between” the previous technologies, he said. “Every kid has a digital printing press.” The broad challenge of lawyers and others is to “come up with new and creative ways” to make the widest range of applications and content available, an outcome that requires creators to be compensated adequately, Walker said. That’s a major adjustment for the law, and “there’s fear of the new,” he said.

On top of that, there are “200 countries out there” with widely differing rules and just one Internet to comply with them, Walker said. Adapting it to “the lowest common denominator of censorship and government restrictions around the world” doesn’t work, he said. Privacy considerations also vary widely, Walker said. “Network effects,” “lock-in,” and “path dependency” pose new challenges to competition laws, he said. Throughout the law, jurisdiction questions abound, Walker said. And the pace of regulation development shouldn’t be allowed to slow innovation any more than necessary, he said.

"Lawyers can and should be innovation facilitators,” Walker said. It’s a matter of finding “a way to get to ‘yes’ … in an environment where it’s very easy to find a way to say ‘no,'” he said. Opportunities for collaboration with regulators and between companies haven’t been taken advantage of fully, Walker said. He pointed to YouTube’s Content ID system for rights holders to identify their property and make money on its use by others. And a cooperative style of work at Google, where collaboration tools are used routinely and the average age of the 600 lawyers is about 30, “changes the culture of what we do,” Walker said. But legal training “doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a nimble and responsive spirit,” he said.

Now that legal rules are just a Web search away for anyone who’s online, lawyers “have to shift from providing knowledge” of formerly arcane information “to providing insight, and maybe on a good day wisdom,” Walker said. The ability to do this is the dividing line between the small group of lawyers who are thriving extraordinarily financially and the much larger one whose compensation has been declining as its work has been commoditized, he said.