The Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) has released its first set of e-communication guidelines in five years.


Hot on the heels of the release of the Law Society's latest e-mail guidelines, published in December, the CCBE's guidelines address wider aspects of electronic communication, and deal with some areas not covered by the Society's advice.


One notable development is the importance attached by the European lawyers' group to digital signing and encryption in the future of legal communication.


Birgit Swatschek, legal adviser to the CCBE's IT law committee, said: 'The CCBE agrees that digital signatures are a central plank of the future of legal IT in Europe, which is why it has included them in the guides.'


As stressed by the outgoing CCBE president, Bernard Vatier, at the Madrid conference, digital signatures are increasingly viewed as a vital step in the move to e-government and the information society.


The EU is pushing for all member states by 2010 to have ID systems that will likely need some form of digital signature, which is partly why the CCBE sees advising on their use as so important. But although digital signatures are going to be central to ID in Europe, some lawyers think it will be hard to get EU-wide interoperability.


Robert Boekhurst, a technology specialist at Stibbe in Amsterdam, told the conference that the area of digital signatures - though vital - is a potential minefield, and it will prove to be very difficult to get any choice of digital signatures to satisfy all EU directives as well as national laws.


The latest Law Society guidelines, meanwhile, contain more up-to-date advice on storing e-mails than the CCBE's advisory, which recommends a stop-gap measure of using hard-copy storage 'although this view may change when the truly electronic office arrives'.


The latest Society guidelines recommend digital storage to retain hidden data.



Links: www.ccbe.org/en/comites/it_law_en.htm#positions



www.it.lawsociety.org.uk