Auletta has written a very fine obituary. Thomson's identities appeared online. The new breed of e-practice managers should take time to cut through the hype and the moral panics. The first law of new media is that it is built on a network. Technically speaking, data is split into packets, given an address and allowed to find their own, fastest route to their destination, where they are recombined.
Organisations can fight against it.
They can try their damnedest to control it but they never will. Just as the http protocol enables data packets to find their way around obstacles, so the network effect means that information will out. This is no comfort to Venables and Thompson, nor to a paranoid practice manager, but it is a fact. Just as those charged with protecting the pair will have to deal with the fact that the law will not provide anonymity, so those charged with managing legal networks will have to work with the fact that they can never be closed. A sensible and confident manager allows or even encourages those conversations, owning them and facilitating them, enabling them to build relationships on which a successful business prospers.