The traditional wisdom, "failing to plan is planning to fail," has been transformed into a rule of thumb for the tech sector: "plan for failure." Firms that do not explicitly anticipate systems failure run the risk of being unprepared for a catastrophe, just as Floridians must plan for hurricanes in August ' and New Orleans must now be prepared for potential dike breaches.

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e-Commerce businesses must be particularly careful about how consumer information is collected and used, and whether such practices comply with the varying state laws ' especially considering that their Internet-based business more than likely reaches consumers in all 50 states.

Corporate management ' at traditional high-rise bricks-and-mortar enterprises and at e-commerce undertakings ' is afraid these days of destroying documents, and that's certainly easy to understand in the current climate of tightened regulation and increased use of technology for discovery. <br>Also, for some sectors, the rise in use of electronic commerce adds a dimension to the need for oversight of document management, as documents are deleted and moved among various parties electronically.

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As advertising gravitates more to the Internet, for lawyers as much as other service providers, the New Jersey Supreme Court's Committee on Attorney Advertising is doing its best to adapt its regulatory scheme to the medium. <br>This year alone, there have been four directives issued on what lawyers may and may not do on the Web, and the most recent puts new restrictions on lawyers' online listings to ensure that potential clients don't interpret them as official endorsements.

While the legal and jurisdictional implications are important, the Internet considerations highlight the complexity associated with the online world and geographic borders. For the majority of the court, the combination of the expert panel evidence and the decision by the French court to limit its restrictions to French users yielded the view that offline geographic borders can be applied to the Internet.

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If hard cases make bad law, perhaps it follows that unusual cases produce bizarre results. Proof of that can be seen in a recent ruling of an 11-judge <i>en banc</i> panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals involving Yahoo's battle against French groups that oppose the sale of Nazi memorabilia.

Right-to-privacy groups say that the Government's attempt to force Google to turn over a broad range of materials from its databases has set a dangerous precedent that should worry all Americans.

Reading the news, one might think the encroaching patchwork of state anti-spyware laws and the proliferation of high-profile cases against surreptitious spyware distributors could finally prompt Congress to take action on spyware in 2006. But a closer look reveals that states, Congress and the Federal Trade Commission have not yet reached a consensus on what spyware is and how best to address enforcement. Even if Congress does act on spyware this year, the legislation is likely to offer an incomplete solution to computer users and, for legitimate online behavioral advertisers, to leave substantial litigation questions unaddressed.