Panel Discussion by General Counsel of Microsoft and Google

At lunch today at the Association of Corporate Counsel Annual Meeting in San Antonio, TX, there was a panel discussion between Brad Smith, Senior Vice President & General Counsel, Microsoft and Kent Walker, Vice President & General Counsel, Google. And it was a thriller!



They set the scene by talking about the amount of information that is available today, and how much we are creating. They talked in units that are like a thousand times bigger than a terabyte. Made my head ache! Then they turned to YouTube. The amount of material being put on it in 24 hours is equivalent to Hollywood releasing 126,000 full length movies every week.



Smith has had to tell colleagues “I know you read that on Wikipedia, but there is more to law than that.” In addition I don’t understand why we put trust in something like Wikipedia which is a collaborative effort of reciting facts. It just doesn’t have credibility from my viewpoint. Really, people, what is likely to be the quality of something that has that sort of input. I’m reminded of the concept of reversion to the mean.



And we are going well beyond gui (graphical user interface), to natural user interface (nui) – more smart screens. And screens where the camera is imbedded in the pixels.



Google thrives on innovation and there was a news story one day about the creation of a robot car. Walker said that you haven’t lived as a General Counsel until a colleague tells you that the Shah of Bahrain wants to drive a robot car, and asks whether Google has to issue a release (for securities law purposes). Think with your head – it’s a “robot” car! Too much ping pong I guess.



They both talked that the best technology tool for in house lawyers are those that are collaborative, presumably like Google docs and SharePoint. These help to create the “hive mind”. Nice concept for a team.



There is clearly a huge advantage to these companies taking on the influx of young workers who have grown up with technology. They described these youngins as “digital natives”. One of their characteristics is that they expect more transparency in the workplace.



Walker spoke of the work Google has done with the Center for Disease Control. The Center was used to tracking the number of cases of flu for example and allocating resources accordingly. What Google introduced them to was watching the numbers of searches on the symptoms (e.g. cough, fever, etc) and realize that when people were searching on that, that flu was about to break out in those areas. So in other words, people can look online for data that will be a better predictor of problems, than monitoring the occurrence of problems.



At one point Smith (remember Microsoft) lamented that it was easier to find info on the web than in their own company. Walker (remember Google) replied: let us know if we can help with that!



A great presentation. Kudos to ACC for arranging this.