Clinic Gives Dot-Coms the Lowdown on High Ground

BERKELEY — Genius, grit and greed drove the first raucous decades of high-tech high life. Now, a cyberlaw expert hopes to start up something new in Silicon Valley: a dot-conscience.

With a staff of law school students at UC Berkeley, the clinic will examine dot-com cons, electronic eavesdropping, copyright battles and other ethical dilemmas.

They’ll focus on issues in which they can have a broad public effect, filing court briefs in cases and representing individuals who are fighting for their cyber rights.

The driving goal: Bring the high ground to high-tech.

The new clinic, founded by law professor Pamela Samuelson and scheduled to open in January, is clicking with some valley veterans.

“This is an area where there is a huge need for legal advice,” says Cindy Cohn, legal director of the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a 10-year-old Web watchdog that includes Samuelson among its directors.

“I tell you, in this glittering Silicon Valley, plenty of people need help,” says Narpat Bhandari, who saw the dot-com dark side when his start-up dreams turned into a bitter legal battle. “It’s a gold rush. Some guys get the gold, everyone else gets rushed.”

Indeed, while there are plenty of upstanding Netizens out there, the high-stakes world of high-tech also attracts gamblers with dicey pasts. New York-based Kroll Associates, a global business investigations and intelligence firm, recently ran background checks on 70 executives, directors and consultants in high-tech firms and found that 27 had been charged with or connected to white-collar crime.

“I’m hoping that one of the things that the clinic will do is try to help raise awareness . . . about the social impacts of technology decisions,” says Samuelson, who is funding the clinic with $2 million of her family’s Net gains.

Bhandari, now a philanthropist and trustee of UC Santa Cruz, is delighted to see a neutral institution stake a claim to virtuous reality.

Back in the 1980s, Bhandari hoped to launch a company based on his idea for a faster computer chip with the backing of a major tech player. But the start-up failed and he was fired, left with no money or stock.

His ex-attorney represented the folks who fired him. For a long time, he couldn’t persuade another lawyer to take his case. “Even my best friend told me, ‘Forget it,’ ” he said.

It took eight years of fighting before he won a $750,000 judgment.

The clinic is also getting the backing of Mitchell Kapor, founder of software pioneer Lotus Development Corp., who pledged $300,000 in support. The New York-based Markle Foundation, headed by Berkeley law graduate Zoe Baird, pledged the same amount.

Students are lining up to get in.

“They’re just totally devouring it,” says Oscar S. Cisneros, a student who hopes to enroll.

As with other Boalt clinics, the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic will be staffed by students under the supervision of professors and a yet-to-be-named director.

Samuelson and her husband, Robert Glushko, a director of e-commerce leader Commerce One, endowed the clinic and donated $1 million for graduate student fellowships after Commerce One’s stock tripled in one day during its July 1999 initial public offering.

Cohn predicts plenty of work for the new clinic.

“A critical mass of people is hitting the Internet. That means that we’re going to see people doing basically the same old stuff that they do to each other in the real world to each other in the digital world. That’s going to raise interesting and important legal questions.”

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On the Net:

For more information on Boalt Hall: www.law.berkeley.edu/academics/clinicals/; www.boalt.org

Electronic Frontier Foundation: www.eff.org/