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            About
our site.
A
Message from Parry.
Welcome to the site. With
so many others out there to choose from, we are delighted you have
chosen to visit ours. Since we are one of the oldest sites online, we
thought we'd give you a bit of information about our site's history.
It has evolved substantially over time, as has our practice. The site
reflects our varied interests and practice development. It also
reflects our evolution from small firm lawyers to cyberlaw, privacy
and security consultants and worldwide media resources. Nancy Savitt
and I are no longer practicing law together. Nancy has gone on to
more structured legal work. I have moved on to spending most of my
time consulting, writing, public speaking and helping create policy.
Our aftab.com site was first launched in March 1996. It was one of the
first legal sites online. We had lots of content, and I updated the
site every couple of days. Keeping the content organized was a
problem, but we had new ideas to share, and deprioritized organization
of the site, in favor of content and tone.
As the site became more popular, we loaded it with more content, and
more disorganization. We still updated it regularly, but old content
was sometimes hidden when the index was redesigned. I write a website
from the outside in <g>...changing the index before all the
content was ready. With dead links and content which couldn't be read,
the firm decided to get a "site lift."
We've tried doing this before, with many generous friends contributing
time and effort to helping us revamp the site. The problem, we learned
(as Hamlet had...) lies not in the site, but in ourselves (with our
abject apologies to Shakespeare)...we had too many topics, and not
enough focus.
We had to decide where our practice was concentrated and how our site
can better serve our clients. Since our clients consisted of medium and
large corporations, we set up special content for in-house counsel. We
also counsel municipalities and governmental entities on cyber-law
issues and risk management, so we set up special content for them, as
well as for libraries and schools. Finally, since this site, and a
large portion of our time is devoted to educating businesses, public
entities and legislators about cyber-law and e-commerce, we have
created a special resource for media and the press to help continue
the educational effort.
We pushed this content, without charge, to
members of the special industries who registered for our new E-Law
News. E-Law News is our
e-zine on cyber-law
developments affecting members of a particular industry.
Once we decided what we wanted to add to the site, we had to choose
what to give up. Choosing what to keep and what to give up was very
hard for us, but choose we did. All content, with the exception of
tech and cyber-law content and "just for fun," was archived.
You can still read about Russian laws and women business networking,
but this content won't be updated. Hopefully, we won't lose our loyal
site visitors, who sat patiently when we recreated pages without
working links. And, hopefully, we'll add to the loyal pack...
When I became more
active in online policy, and spent more time doing volunteer work for
online safety and building out those sites, instead of ours, the
content at aftab.com quickly became out of date, and in many cases
inaccurate. For the brief period of time that Nancy Savitt and I spent
at another firm, we abandoned the site and just linked people to the
firm's site. When we left to do independent consulting and policy
work, we didn't update the pages, and the old firm received many
inquiries from people looking for us. Those inquiries ranged from
Oprah to former and current clients. But with all the demands on our
time, updating these pages never made it to the top of the list.
We tried updating it and redesigning it. So many
articles we wrote are no longer accurate given the change of laws and the
evolution of the Internet. We weren't sure what to do with them, as they were
still being sited by judges and in the media as if they were still accurate.
This site reflects changes in our lives. As I devoted
more time to pro bono activities in online safety, the legal articles and
portions of the site were neglected. When a girlfriend called me two weeks ago,
and told me that the pro bono had eclipsed the professional content and people
were forgetting I was a cyberawyer and Internet privacy consultant I became
concerned. Can this site reflect the precarious balance I live between my pro
bono and public service and my professional life? We'll have to see.
Let us know how you
like this site and if we can improve it. We have chosen to opt for
content and a simple design and navigation, rather than lots of high
tech java bells and whistles. Although I may play with flash from time
to time, we will aim to keep this site simple. Our feedback form can
be found at
feedback
(good name, huh?). Or you can
e-mail
me personally.
To read historical bios of me from our site archives,
click
here and
here.
To read more about my archived law firm practice articles,
click
here and
here.
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Parry
Aftab, Esq., 
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all character names and the distinctive likenesses thereof are trademarks of
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Trademark.