They were promoting their ability to archive, track, and manage electronic communications such as emails, instant messages, and web conferences to comply with new provisions of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that went into effect this month.

This is all new information to me, so I set out to do some research. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure apparently govern the way that federal courts conduct civil (non-criminal) trials. They try to make sure that similar cases are treated similarly by the courts. Procedures cover what information is received by the judge or jury, how that information is to be presented, and by what standards of proof the information will be judged (thank you to Cornell Law School’s Wex legal learning site!).

The new amendments referenced in FaceTime’s release apply to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 26: General Provisions Governing Discovery; Duty of Disclosure. In short, companies have an obligation to proactively provide any and all documents in their possession that could be germane to a court case. The new amendments clarify that “documents” include electronic communications. But in trying to read through the legal gobbledygook of the rule text, I couldn’t find anything that explicitly included or excluded webcasts and webinars.

I found a nice article by Jennifer Schiff from last month that tried to lay out the big issues in more friendly terminology. Unfortunately Ms. Schiff concentrates on email (which is obviously the big ticket item as far as most corporate communications are concerned).

I think it is thoroughly possible for the content of a public or private webcast, web conference, or webinar to fall under the discovery provisions of the rule. This is particularly true if you made a recording of the web conference at any time. Then getting rid of the recording could be seen as an attempt to avoid discovery in a case where it was relevant. This brings up interesting implications for producers of web conferences.

First, if you are using a vendor that requires recordings to be stored on their servers and can’t provide a permanent file to you, you may be in trouble. You are supposed to keep these electronic documents available and accessible if called upon in a case.

Second, the storage space requirements for recorded webinars are massively greater than storing a bunch of text communications such as email or instant message logs. If your company does a lot of webcasts over time, it may be more cost effective to hire a service to create hardcopy transcripts of the audio track and just save those. From my reading of the rule, transcripts of vocal communications are acceptable.

I am no lawyer, and nothing in this blog posting should be taken as legal advice. I’m still fuzzy on the practical details myself. But if you are a moderately large company that faces the common problem of dealing with civil lawsuits and you produce webcasts, you’d better ask your corporate attorney what s/he thinks!

PS: Think the problem is academic? Check out this astonishing statistic from Ms. Schiff’s article:

According to a recent report by the Business Performance Management Forum and AXS-One Inc., 36.4 percent of the senior executives and subject matter experts interviewed said their companies had no technologies or policies in place to manage a legal discovery order involving electronic records. Even more troubling, 33 percent said they had no corporate policy in place covering electronic records management in general – and 20 percent didn’t know if they even had a policy.

Here’s another troubling set of statistics: an October 2005 study by law firm Fulbright & Jaworski revealed that companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue are engaged in an average of 147 lawsuits simultaneously, while companies with average revenues under $1 billion were juggling 37 lawsuits at any given time.

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With a background in software development and marketing, Ken has been producing and delivering business webinars since 1999. His background in public speaking, radio, stage acting, and training has given him a unique perspective on what it takes to create a compelling and effective presentation. Currently Ken offers consulting services through his company Webinar Success (www.wsuccess.com).

So reads the opening paragraph of a new press release out of Germany. Wonderful! A new resource for potential web conferencing customers, helping them separate marketing hype from real, objective testing. We need a lot more of that. Of course I immediately zipped over to the site to see what they had to say.

The first thing that struck me as unusual was the fact that there were no links to a product or service provider that would explain why somebody would take the time, effort, and expense to create the site and pay for its hosting. There weren’t any banner ads, sponsors, or even standard Google text ads sprinkled around the site. Was this truly an altruistic gift to us, with no strings attached and no potential revenue stream for the creators? Past precedents and the business model of the Web make that seem unlikely.

Then I went to their summary chart of results. At the bottom of the page it declared Citrix GoToMeeting the winner of the competition. Then it offered a “Free trial account with the winning solution.” There is a hyperlink to the trial registration site. That’s strange… the other three vendors also have free trials available through direct links. Why aren’t they listed on the site for easy customer comparison?

So I dug deeper. I checked the comments in the various feature fields. Starting with the first entry under “Ease of use” (Solution design/architecture) I find these comments for GoToMeeting: “Quick, easy and secure. Solution is quick and easy to use thanks to its low complexity; high cost transparency.” Hmmm… That sounds like marketing copy that doesn’t tell us anything. Quick, easy, and secure are generic adjectives and not very descriptive of a specific architecture or design. “High cost transparency” may be a mangled translation from the original German, but I can’t figure out what it means.

“Planning effort” for GoToMeeting: “Planning is simple and intuitive.” Kind of fuzzy, but encouraging in a generic way.

“Solution complexity” for GoToMeeting: “Intuitive user interface thanks to clearly structured menu design.” Ummm, okay. Not a lot of specifics here either. What about the other tools? Live Meeting and WebEx both get: “Highly complex due to wide-ranging features…” Live Meeting “requires extensive FAQs and online support” while WebEx has “options that few users really need.” That’s a sweeping generalization of feature needs for the entire market! And strangely, Adobe Acrobat Connect has no comment at all.

By this time, I’m smelling a marketing machine at work. I spent a long time in enterprise software marketing myself. Some pawing through links took me to the website of the owners and creators of this utility. It is Publicare Marketing Communications GmbH. An email marketing firm put together a comparison of web conferencing vendors? How strange! Let’s check their website and look for a client list. I don’t speak German, but I think I can recognize some corporate names in the following sentence: “Zu unseren Kunden zahlen Unternehmen wie American Express, Citrix Systems, Compuware, Motorola und Ravensburger.” Hey, kids! I just found Waldo!

Now I bear no ill will towards Citrix and GoToMeeting. I rather like their software and I think it works well. In a short time, they have moved from a small-time also-ran to a major competitor in the web conferencing world. I particularly like the fact that they recently expanded to handle formal events with GoToWebinar. But this is an example of underhanded and deceptive marketing practice and that really bugs me. If you want to tout your own product, do it. Marketing is important and serves a purpose. But give your readers the courtesy of knowing who has sponsored the work. And don’t start out with a bald-faced lie stating that you are presenting “a vendor-independent assessment.” For shame!

By the way, for past articles and opinions on the confusing subject of webinar and web conferencing vendor selection, you can browse these entries in the blog:

• Comparing Web Conferencing Comparisons
• New TMR Report on e-Learning Conferencing Products
• Summary of Forrester/WebEx Wave Webinar
• Vendor Comparison Available
• How To Grill A Web Conferencing Vendor
• Picking Through A Plethora of Providers

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With a background in software development and marketing, Ken has been producing and delivering business webinars since 1999. His background in public speaking, radio, stage acting, and training has given him a unique perspective on what it takes to create a compelling and effective presentation. Currently Ken offers consulting services through his company Webinar Success (www.wsuccess.com).