Practicing Computer Crime Law

I've had a couple of posts about computer crime law as a law school course, and I wanted to turn to a more practical question: Can you practice computer crime law?

The answer is yes, particularly on the prosecution side. At the federal level, the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. has a large Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (where I worked from 1998-2001). Most of the major U.S. Attorney's Offices have started Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property units, and every U.S. Attorney's Office has at least one computer crime specialist. At the state and local level, most of the major state offices have some kind of High Technology Crime Unit. All of this means that a prosecutor with an understanding of computer crime law will find a lot of opportunities. As I noted in my last post, computer crime law covers lots of new questions of legal doctrine; a solid knowledge of the new areas of law can help a lawyer carve out a very useful and interesting niche.

The development of computer crime law has been hindered by the scarcity of defense attorneys who understand it. Most defense attorneys are pretty clueless about this stuff. They don't understand the relevant technology, and they don't understand the nuances of the law. This means that they often don't raise good legal arguments that they should be raising, and that there are fewer judicial opinions on the key questions than there should be. A few attorneys have specialized in defending computer crime cases, most notably Jennifer Granick, but most computer crime cases are defended by lawyers who don't have any particular knowledge or expertise in the field. This creates a significant opportunity for young lawyers in particular. If you understand the law and the technology, you'll have a very helpful knowledge base that can help clients even if you lack other practice experience in criminal law.