On Wednesday, I had the opportunity to attend American Lawyer Media's Social Media: Risks & Rewards conference as an ILN Marketing Partner. As evidence of the popularity of the conference's content, the room was almost standing room only by the end of the morning. (For tweets from the conference, see the #LSMC hashtag results)

The first two sessions focused more on the "risks" portion of the conference, discussing a lot of concerns about social media. The first speaker was Joel Reidenberg, Professor of Law and Director of the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham University School of Law. His presentation was "Beyond Terms of Use: From Handcuffs to Handshake?"

Professor Reidenberg began by saying that it's important to think about Terms of Service as an effort by social media sites to bring some certainty to their own environment where the law is lacking and vague. Terms of Service typically consist of two sets of documents...