International Law

eLawtric Books anyone?

Posted on November 20, 2009
Jason Wilson explores the pros and cons of what he dubs “eLawtric Books“. In a series of posts he (for the most part) counters Eugene Volokh?s thoughts on the future of electronic books and the law. His view, with which I agree, is that ebooks a la Kindle et al are not the future of law [...

Supreme Court judgments - where to read the full story

Posted on October 26, 2009
Thanks to Jennie Law for pointing out  that the new UKSC needs to get its publishing act together. It’s been in existence for almost four weeks now and has the most advanced court technology in the world. It delivered its first judgment on 14 October, yet no cases yet appear in the Decided Cases section...

A letter

Posted on October 22, 2009
Today I received a letter! Not a love letter*, nor a middle class thank you note, and not an impersonal business letter, but a thank you letter which sought to maintain and progress a business relationship. What a pleasure! Anyone else remember the days when tweeps and other peeps wrote letters? * Weren’t the 60s fab! And [...

Is the law a can of beans? (reprise)

Posted on October 16, 2009
Way back in 1999 I wrote a piece on the commoditisation of legal services which still resonates today. Some lawyers are still arguing that there are so many potential pitfalls in using commoditised online services that the customer should always seek legal advice...

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The end of BigLawyers - does the rest of society care?

Posted on October 14, 2009
Having just penned my previous post on BigLaw, I browsed the latest issue of Legal Information Management and was riveted not by my own article therein :=), nor by any of the many other worthy articles, but by the Book Review at the end in which solicitor Gillian Bull rather comprehensively disses Susskind’s The End [...

Are we (still) in thrall to BigLaw?

Posted on October 13, 2009
Jordan Furlong bemoans (on Slaw and Law21) the fact that the legal media focus on BigLaw, because BigLaw makes a lot of money, so they?re attractive both as subscribers and as advertising targets. It?s not good for smaller practices, which count the majority of all lawyers among their ranks, that they don?t get to hear their [...

Sidewiki - bad idea

Posted on October 02, 2009
Google Sidewiki has got many excited, not because it is neat or cool, but because it is a bad idea - something that feels instinctively wrong and that, after not much further thought, clearly is wrong. Sidewiki installs on the Google Toolbar and allows anyone to comment on any web page, displaying ranked comments in a [...

Never mind the content (2)

Posted on September 25, 2009
Paul Graham, an essayist and successful entrepreneur, pens a very interesting piece on Post-Medium Publishing which is worth reading in full (hat tip John Naughton). He opens: consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either...

Meta keywords are a waste of time

Posted on September 23, 2009
Google has finally officially confirmed what the SEO community has known for years: it “disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking”. So, don’t waste any more time on them and don’t be impressed by anyone who suggests they matter (including would-be plaintiffs)...

Social business design

Posted on September 10, 2009
“Social business design” is a term you’ve probably not encountered before. I was introduced to it last evening by social computing expert and entrepreneur Lee Bryant at Headshift where I attended an event to explore the themes covered in the report Social Networking for the Legal Profession authored by him with Penny Edwards...

Search engine optimisation - a holistic approach

Posted on September 05, 2009
First Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, September 2009. Most users don?t look past the first two or three pages of results returned by a search engine, so understanding and implementing search engine optimisation (SEO) is critical. SEO is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines [...

Never mind the content, feel the packaging

Posted on August 18, 2009
So, Rupert Murdoch has declared that News International sites will all start charging for content by next summer. What he actually said was he was satisfied that News International could produce “significant revenues from the sale of digital delivery of newspaper content”, that “we intend to charge for all our news websites” and “make our [...

Typography for Lawyers

Posted on July 29, 2009
Having cut my working teeth in an editorial department in law book publishing, Typography for Lawyers is just up my street. With the advent of the microprocessor, along came word processing, then desktop publishing, then the web. Along the way regular users have been given ever more sophisticated tools easily to generate typography and layouts previously [...

Free - radical or not?

Posted on July 16, 2009
“Free” is a word that has many connotations and arouses strong feelings. Giving away products and services for free in order to sell other products and services is a well-established marketing model. What is new in the digital world is how the marginal cost of delivering services has declined to near zero...

Improving legislation on the web

Posted on July 05, 2009
First Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, July 2009. In 1996 HMSO started publishing new legislation on its website. Comprehensive coverage was later extended back to 1987 for Acts and 1988 for SIs. Although publication of legislation was timely and presentation competent, we yearned for what had been promised for many years ? a comprehensive, [...

Social networks - how they work

Posted on July 05, 2009
First Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, July 2009. Facebook has over 200 million users; LinkedIn, the network for business and professionals, has over 40 million; Twitter is all the rage; and don?t forget blogs. Although these services are hugely popular, it?s safe to say that amongst lawyers use is still largely confined to so-called early [...

Friendfeed for lawyers

Posted on July 02, 2009
Some time ago I set up a Friendfeed account and plugged in a couple of my feeds. I did not pay it any further attention until recently I noticed a number of my band of followers were subscribing to my Friendfeed. So I checked out why. Via the Twitterverse I was pointed to this great post [...

Twitter - is the party over?

Posted on June 25, 2009
Has what looked like a great service, populated by eager early adopters with like motivations turned into a service polluted by egotists, marketeers and spam artists? Larry Bodine, questioning the value of Twitter as a marketing tool for lawyers, thinks so: I’ve learned that it is a shouting post for relentless self-promoters, a dumping ground for [...

Dead blogs

Posted on June 20, 2009
Scott Greenfield has advice for bloggers who have decided to call it a day: I ask you one thing.  Take it down.  Pull it.  Remove it, once and for all.  Do this for me.  More importantly, do this for you. For my purpose, you’re leaving your litter and cluttering up my blogosphere...

Light at the end of the tunnel

Posted on May 12, 2009
Asked whether he envisaged fees at his British papers such as … the Sun …, he replied: “We’re absolutely looking at that.“

Rivers of ?

Posted on May 12, 2009
 Rest in Peace, RSS - flame bait from Steve Gillmor. It?s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn?t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it?s not worth swimming in if you get my drift...

Internet Newsletter for Lawyers May/June issue

Posted on May 08, 2009
In this issue: Beyond collaboration by Jordan Furlong CaseCheck sans borders by Stephen Moore Why should lawyers blog? by Daniel Barnett Words fit for purpose by Joe Reevy Planning an email campaign by Sue Bramall Inksters innovations by Brian Inkster Sweet & Maxwell?s new web presence by Asomi Ithia Voice recognition in practice by James Couzens View the Newsletter...

CaseCheck crosses the border

Posted on April 23, 2009
CaseCheck, headed by Stephen Moore, has since late 2007 been delivering case summaries from the Scottish Courts and EAT in a Web 2.0 environment. Now, in a tie-up with Law Brief Publishing, CaseCheck has added 4,000 England and Wales and EU case summaries from Law Brief Update...

Blowing it

Posted on April 08, 2009
Plenty to ponder about the future not just of the established news industry but also of other old media players in this post from Jeff Jarvis and the numerous comments: You?ve had all that time to reinvent your products, services, and organizations for this new world, to take advantage of new opportunities and efficiencies, to retrain [...

Free Culture - the extended Remix

Posted on April 08, 2009
Remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy (published in the UK by Bloomsbury Academic) is the latest in Lawrence Lessig’s series on regulation of cyberspace. Lessig is undeniably the leading thinker on copyright in the digital age and, though many label him a radical, his arguments derive from those of earlier leading [...

Martindale-Hubbell opens the doors - just a crack

Posted on April 03, 2009
For LexisNexis it’s simple: lawyers want a network developed by legal professionals, for legal professionals, and LexisNexis will provide it. From their recent press release on the launch of Martindale-Hubbell Connected: A survey conducted by Leader Networks in 2008 demonstrated the need for a private, online network for lawyers...

Moral panics

Posted on March 25, 2009
Last night in London the SCL welcomed William Patry - inter alia long-time author of 6,000 pages of Patry on Patents, past Copyright Counsel to the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary and currently Copyright Counsel to Google inc - to deliver its the annual lecture, “Crafting an effective Copyright Law”...

Not a problem

Posted on March 18, 2009
Clay Shirky eloquently states the problem facing the newspaper industry: People committed to saving newspapers [are] demanding to know ?If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?? To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke...

Internet Newsletter for Lawyers & Law 2.0 March/April issue

Posted on March 06, 2009

The future law book is not a book

Posted on March 03, 2009

Don?t you just love comment spam from those who should know better

Posted on February 26, 2009
Denver Personal Injury Lawyer | sharonsmith333@yahoo.com | osullivan-law-firm.com | IP: 72.70.201.98 wrote: I really enjoyed your post. I will have to come back again to read some more of them. Dear Sharon I’m so pleased you not only visited my blog but took the time and trouble to comment so incisively...

The end of print?

Posted on February 25, 2009
We’ve been here before and each time the answer is no. There’s too much in favour of print to bury it prematurely. However, we know that particular types of print are under severe threat. The continuing decline of newsprint in particular is well documented...

Chain Matrix 2

Posted on February 20, 2009
Neo and the rebel leaders estimate that they have 72 hours until 250,000 probes discover Zion and destroy it and its inhabitants. During this, Neo must decide how he can save Trinity from a dark fate in his dreams. - The Matrix Reloaded [aka 2] Back in the real world Land Registry is offering to support [...

Your blog is your brand

Posted on February 18, 2009
In two recent posts Kevin O’Keefe follow-ups on why a law blog does not belong inside your law firm website, on which I’ve already commented. He confirms his view, concerns about maintaining the law firm’s brand notwithstanding: A brand for a good lawyer is not about design, collars, logo’s and the like...

Twitter as a feed aggregator

Posted on February 12, 2009
A couple of months back OPSI set up a Twitter account for @legislation, feeding it with the OPSI new legislation feeds. That will reach out to a wider audience than the feeds themselves, but I wonder what that wider audience will make of it. Evidence is as yet scant (samples: “Wow, this is cool - [...

Valuing complexity

Posted on February 11, 2009
Thanks to Prism Legal for pointing to an analysis that gives the lie to the assertion that complex legal documents cannot be “packaged” (if not “commoditised”). KIIAC are specialists who “create standard templates with clause alternatives for high quality, rapid document drafting”: As part of our work to create document templates automatically, quantify differences among like documents, [...

Reformation

Posted on February 11, 2009
Deep thought (as ever) from Jordan Furlong at Law21 on the future of lawyers a la Susskind. He concludes: If we take another meaning of ?end? ­? an outcome worked toward or an objective for which effort is expended, rather than the more popular meaning of ?disappearance? ? then we could say that this is a [...

Brainstorm on web law at LawCampLeeds

Posted on February 05, 2009
Jane Lambert of NIPC (also NIPC Law and @nipclaw) is organising LawCampLeeds on 7 April, which will address practical solutions to legal problems presented by development and use of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 technologies. I’m sure all you IP/IT lawyers will benefit...

#legalitshow anyone?

Posted on February 04, 2009
Those like me who are experimenting with Twitter Search should find this post by Steven Feldman of interest. He describes how the hashtag #uksnow evolved from a simple hashtag to one which, with the addition of postcode and snowfall parameters (eg #uksnow SW14 2/10), provided a crowdsourced realtime report of snowfall throughout the UK, then [...

Pirates, criminals or would-be honest consumers?

Posted on February 02, 2009
The SCL has published 11 articles arising from its forum entitled ?Legislating for Web 2.0 ? Preparing for the Communications Act??. I was rather taken with Andrew Adams and Ian Brown’s presentation on the futility of seeking technological solutions to enforcing copyright, entitled Keep Looking: The Answer to the Machine is Elsewhere, from which: On keeping [...

The declining value of (legal) news

Posted on January 30, 2009
Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 is the guy when it comes to commenting on the new landscape for news publishing. Back in May last year he posted about The declining value of redundant news content on the web. I’ll illustrate his point with a UK legal news example...

What are lawyers worth?

Posted on January 29, 2009
I’m following with interest the increasingly prolific debate on alternative billing. Read three in particular: Jordan Furlong’s Billing thread on Law21 Toby Brown’s Alternative Billing thread on 3 Geeks and a Law Blog Ron Baker’s Value Billing thread on the VeraSage Institute Blog Moving to value billing from the comfort of the billable hour may not be easy, but [...

Pushing the boat out

Posted on January 28, 2009
There’s a lengthy discussion on Real Lawyers Have Blogs on Why a law blog does not belong inside your law firm website. For me it boils down to this. Effective blogging is you - or a group including you - (as Kevin says) “providing valuable information, insight, and commentary to your target audience”, so don’t hide [...

Who Dares wins

Posted on January 19, 2009
You’d think that a Big Law associate on £150K p.a. would be bright enough to figure that she should use a pseudonym when publishing her raunchy novel on the web. Not so Deidre Dare, Senior Associate at Allen & Overy, Russia. But could it be she didn’t see her future at A & O and figured that [...

Internet Newsletter for Lawyers & Law 2.0 January/February issue

Posted on January 07, 2009
In this issue: Law publishing at the crossroads by Nick Holmes E-marketing for barristers ? Part 1 by Gerald Newman Open access Scottish law reports by Anthony Kinahan New HIP Regulations ? where we are now by Rob Hailstone Introducing an intranet by Helen Dewar New online ventures for OUP by Alison Bowker Enhancing profile with a free information service by Jonathan [...

2009

Posted on December 31, 2008
I usually leave it until the last minute to frame my “binary law” predictions for the year ahead. After all, a lot can happen in a month and it’s of course helpful to have the benefit of everyone else’s predictions first! In the SCL IT & law predictions for 2009 (batch 1, batch 2, batch 3) [...

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

Posted on December 30, 2008
I recently commented far too favourably on the the new Law Society Gazette site. There is no way to browse the archives which is frustrating. But to give the site some juice, the opinion sections in particular should be inviting our comments. I’d have liked, for example, to respond to Clive Wismayer, Solicitor, Great Bookham, who [...

Twitter redux

Posted on December 17, 2008
In Twitter, the good the bad and the ugly James Mullan poses some of the questions many have in understanding - and extracting - the value of Twitter. Perhaps I should … lower my expectations of what value I?m actually going to derive from Twitter...

What about clients?

Posted on December 12, 2008
In a series of recent posts, Jordan Furlong gives his slant on the arguments at the heart of Richard Susskind’s thesis: Decoupling price from cost in legal services: In order to turn a profit, firms will be forced to streamline their costs of production, whatever they might be...

Barristers? CPD - don?t panic

Posted on December 12, 2008
In his inimitable style Geeklawyer trashes the need for CPD for barristers: “let?s bin the **** rubbish”. That pending, he recommends using a cheap online CPD provider. I couldn’t agree more. By far the best value in town are the two current Legal Web ebooks with CPD which Delia Venables and I have compiled: each is [...

The future of lawyers

Posted on December 10, 2008
I have not yet found on the public access web anything approaching a review of Richard Susskind’s The End of Lawyers? (Oxford University Press). So I must conclude I’m one of the few who have actually read it from cover to cover. To say I’ve read it is a bit of an exaggeration; I confess [...

AustLII case law developments

Posted on December 03, 2008
The good people at AustLII have been working on a citator for common law cases and the fruits of their labours can now be checked out at LawCite (Alpha). LawCite is an international case citator and is the first product of a 3 year Australian Research Council funded project to research into automated systems for citation [...

Way to go Law Society Gazette

Posted on November 07, 2008
Must have been asleep or too busy these last few months to notice that the Law Society Gazette has morphed into a wonderful site: Online the Gazette is as radically changed [as the print edition], with all sections of the magazine represented. Most importantly, each area of Gazette coverage is now easily accessible - we have [...

Blogging is normal - let?s move on

Posted on November 07, 2008
An article in this week?s Economist concludes: Gone, in other words, is any sense that blogging as a technology is revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted, and this upsets some of its pioneers. Confirmed, however, is the idea that blogging is useful and versatile...

Hard times?

Posted on November 07, 2008
A personal opinion from a “usually tetchy but recently quite chipper old buzzard” on how the recession is affecting the legal world: Personal Injury - times have never been better Housing Law - good times! Divorce - quiet time of year, but come January, credit crunch or no, its open season Wills and Probate - dead as a dodo Employment [...

Internet Newsletter for Lawyers & Law 2.0 November/December issue

Posted on November 05, 2008
In this issue: Does price comparison work for legal services? by Anthony Armitage Alternative legal services ? solicitors fight back by Delia Venables Law Society Library Online by Chris Holland Developing a niche practice online by Tessa Shepperson Virtual in-house legal services by Katherine Evans Managing Web 2...

exCiting Times

Posted on October 29, 2008
I’ve mentioned Feedity before - a natty feed generator which will scrape a web page and deliver a feed based on the linked list(s) it finds there. It usually returns some unwanted links too, but you can then tweek the feed to deliver just the main items...

In praise of editors

Posted on October 29, 2008
In the The end of the story - as we know it in Guardian Media Jeff Jarvis republishes the argument in his earlier blog post that The building block of journalism is no longer the article. Single posts, videos, Wikipedia entries or search results may be new building blocks of media, but we need order atop [...

Are you being served?

Posted on October 27, 2008
I’ve been asked - and I ask you as I have some difficulty with the question: What are law firms’ needs when it comes to legal publishing? And to what extent are those needs being met by the legal publishing companies? My difficulties with the question are twofold...

Bilge pump

Posted on October 24, 2008
I’m not going to take the linkbait laid by Paul Boutin in Wired Magazine telling us to quit blogging because the blogosphere has been “flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge” and that time is “better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter”...

Not a plug for Lexis Web

Posted on October 17, 2008
Tried out the (US) Lexis Web beta search engine yet? It indexes “important, legal-oriented Web content selected and validated by the LexisNexis editorial staff”, including Governmental agency information (federal, state, local) Informal commentary on legal issues (e...

Free Legal Web Barcamp

Posted on October 01, 2008
The Free Legal Web Barcamp is taking place on Saturday 18 October at the RSA in London. We already have a good number of people participating, but more is better. If you’d like to have your say as to how the Free Legal Web might be developed, please do sign up...

Catching up

Posted on September 18, 2008
Been away on protracted hols. Quite possible to have kept posting of course, but did not have the inclination. Had I done so, here’s a few things I might have posted about: Martindale-Hubbell Connected In July Robert Ambroggi took an exclusive first look...

Will lawyers always be tech laggards?

Posted on September 18, 2008
Simon Fodden on Slaw writes that the 2008 ABA Legal Technology Survey reports that most attorneys stay current via websites and email newsletters; only a small minority reads blogs, and blogging is seen as geeky; RSS feeds are not used by most, social networks are only just now catching on and podcasts and online videos [...

Internet Newsletter for Lawyers & Law 2.0 September/October issue

Posted on September 08, 2008
In this issue: Alternative legal services: part 2 Enjoyable and useful ? CPD from Nick and Delia Pay per click advertising Mining the value of law firm publications Navigating the Web 2.0 safe harbour Justis extend Irish reports Lextranet ? an intranet for a law firm Getting it wrong with Web 2...

Two new ebooks with CPD

Posted on September 06, 2008
A belated plug for the two new Legal Web ebooks edited and published jointly by me and Delia Venables. The 2008/2009 ebooks are: Topics of Modern Legal Practice Software as a Service for legal applications New and developing legal resources on the web Alternative legal services - how will legal services be delivered in future? Domain names in a legal [...

Behind the times

Posted on August 21, 2008
Alex Wade in Times Online looks at blawging: “only a handful of legal practitioners maintain blogs”. No way! Sure only a handful of law firms maintain firm-branded blogs, but as we on Binary Law all know, maybe half the hundreds of UK blawgs out there are by practitioners; and let’s not forget to mention the academics, [...

Don?t don the black cap

Posted on August 20, 2008
A recent post on LexBlog highlights the importance of knowing what you’re doing or what others are doing for you when you seek to boost your Google juice by purchasing links or engaging in “excessive” link exchanges. In his post FindLaw gaming Google? Kevin O’Keefe reviews what FindLaw are doing for lawyer customers for $1,000 [...

The Free Legal Web

Posted on August 19, 2008
Spotted the new addition to the header menu? Read the Manifesto.

Hello Canada!

Posted on August 11, 2008
I’ve recommended the Canadian-based co-operative blog Slaw before as one of the best blawgs around. Pop it in your reader now. There’s been a recent decision to expand its coverage beyond the original “legal research” - we’ll have to see how that pans out - and to expand its membership...

Blogs as a publishing platform

Posted on July 23, 2008
Dave Winer, pioneer of blogging, RSS and other publishing standards, recently posted about the importance of blogs as a publishing platform: Publishing keeps getting cheaper. That’s been the constant push, the practical application of Moore’s Law in my neck of the woods...

Internet Newsletter for Lawyers & Law 2.0 July/August 2008 issue

Posted on July 14, 2008
In this issue: Alternative legal services Why email newsletters? Getting the best from RSS Clicks are not enough New Legal Web ebooks with CPD A new search engine for employment law ? ELISE Software as a Service for barristers The law publishers and Web 2...

Unlocking the power of information

Posted on July 10, 2008
As regular readers will know, one of my pet subjects is unlocking the power of public sector information, and I’ve actively campaigned for it as it relates to legal information. The ball is now really rolling on this with the introduction of two new services from government: From OPSI - Public Sector Information Unlocking Service (beta) As the [...

Vote Binary Law for a better future

Posted on July 08, 2008
Fame of a sort beckons. Would all my readers form an orderly queue and cast their votes here: in Law Blogs

Going to Barbados

Posted on June 29, 2008
See you soon.

Monitoring LexMonitor

Posted on June 25, 2008
There has been a fair amount of comment on LexMonitor, Lexblog’s law blog aggregation service in the last few days since its soft launch. Aside from straightforward reports of its launch and what it is, there have been some who have been quick to trash it - either the whole concept or because of current failings...

LexMonitor

Posted on June 23, 2008
Congrats to LexBlog who have just launched LexMonitor, “a daily review of law blogs and journals highlighting prominent legal discussion as well as the lawyers and other professionals participating in this conversation.” LexMonitor pulls feeds from nearly 2,000 sources and 5,000 authors, classifies them and serves them up, sliced and diced by subject category, author etc [...

Above the law?

Posted on June 23, 2008
Ironic that Above the Law should post a list of its Official Top 10 Law Songs replete with links to YouTube video clips, none of which, I’ll wager, are licensed. You have to wonder who voted in the poll. Heading the list is the Clash’s version of They Fought the Law and the Law Won with [...

Are you LinkedIn?

Posted on June 18, 2008
It seems that “serious” social networking - LinkedIn in particular - is now being seriously embraced by the legal profession. Whereas Facebook is probably correctly seen primarily as a place to socialise rather than do business and is full of clutter, LinkedIn is a focussed and uncluttered service for the professional/business person - a place [...

Real lawyers should network

Posted on June 13, 2008
Robert Ambrogi has written the first of two articles on social networking for lawyers for law.com’s Legal Technology News. In the first, Social Networking May Pay Off in the End he starts off by saying that “social networking web sites are just glorified directories”...

RSS - who profits?

Posted on June 04, 2008
In response to my last post, Susan Cartier Liebel raises the question of the legalities of streaming others? feeds without permission. She points to her post Shouldn’t You Have To Ask Permission If You Want To Take A Blog’s Feed For Your Profit? which has attracted considerable comment...

RSS - endless possibilities ? if only

Posted on June 03, 2008
When I said at the turn of the last year that RSS would explode in 2007, I don’t think I was being particularly prescient. The RSS standard was then sufficiently well established that it was only a matter of time (and in internet time, that means months rather than years) before it took hold...

Law tweeting proposition 2

Posted on June 02, 2008
Excellent response to my call to arms for blawgers to start tweeting. First up were John Bolch, Nearly Legal, Usefully Employed, LawMinx and Charon QC. So now for my next proposition: pipe us the best feeds in your area of legal interest. Here’s how: Set up a new Twitter account with a meaningful username like xxxlaw...

All blawgers should tweet

Posted on May 30, 2008
Here’s a proposition: all blawgers not yet on Twitter should tweet … starting now. Don’t hang about. Why? Let’s not get hung up analysing the possible benefits. If you’re a blawger, you’re already part-persuaded. Twitter is another communication channel / networking tool that’s worth trying...

Karaoke anyone?

Posted on May 21, 2008
Doug Cornelius has published a great set of slides which he used in his recent presentation on An Attorney’s Perspective on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. Have a walk through the slides and see if you can parrot what he was saying.

Twitter for lawyers

Posted on May 21, 2008
I’d call Twitter instant messaging with legs - the legs being the attractively light-touch networking functions provided by Twitter and fleshed out as you please by third party Twitter applications. As to how lawyers can best take advantage of it, you can do no better than read Steve Matthews’ post on Lawyer Marketing With Twitter (”It?s [...

drm, drm, drm drm drm drm drmmmmm

Posted on May 15, 2008
Hey, who said markets don’t work? Ironically, the music companies are now abandoning DRM because it worked too well. Apple wouldn’t license its version to rivals - so the best-selling iPod drove the iTunes store to its present position, where it is the third-largest music retailer in any form in the US...

No such thing as a free lunch

Posted on May 15, 2008
According to an email received (as a valued subscriber)  from FreePint (highly recommended): In June 2008, VIP Magazine will be publishing a special focus on legal products. The issue will feature: LexisNexis and Westlaw: Comparing the Big Two head-to-head in an in-depth research review CCH from Wolters Kluwer: A close look at a tax and accounting product with [...

Why I?m tweeting

Posted on May 14, 2008
Not being one to jump too readily onto a bandwagon, I only yesterday signed up on Twitter. With the benefit of that vast experience, I won’t yet wax lyrical about it. But I’m not about to diss it either - far from it. It’s clearly a useful tool for you to do with what you [...

Something no one else has

Posted on May 12, 2008
From an amusing piece by Jeffrey Goldberg on advice he received on becoming a blogger: A blogger should only post, when he has “something new to add to something old,” and has “something that no one else has.” Do not “post for the sake of posting...

Law news - benchmark sites

Posted on May 12, 2008
Following my last post on law firm newsletters having to compete with the best online law news services, it’s worth pointing to two law news sites who fortuitously received gongs last week as the very best in their respective industries: OUT-LAW...

Law firm newsletters - do or die

Posted on May 10, 2008
Jordan Furlong on the futility of most law firm newsletters. Law firms sometimes seem to think their newsletters, print or e-mail, are competing only against other law firm newsletters for clients? attention. They?re not. They?re competing against every business and industry publication their clients read, usually produced by large publishing companies with decades of experience...

Blawgs of note

Posted on May 02, 2008
I was asked to write an article for the Legal Executive Journal (April issue) on the best law blogs. I’m not into “the best” and conferring awards, but I did agree to write a piece on “What makes a good blawg”, mentioning a few of my ?blawgs of note?: established law blogs that have made [...

Internet Newsletter for Lawyers & Law 2.0 May/June 2008 issue

Posted on May 02, 2008
In this issue: Towards Gov 2.0 - by me The impact of social networking on firms The ultimately flexible (virtual) law firm Criminal Law Week acquired by Sweet & Maxwell Technology for today’s courtroom Quick and easy custom search with Google - me again Protecting reputation on the web Irish Law Society allows first online CPD Out of the box intranets: Intranet DASHBOARD SharePoint and [...

Corruption 2.0

Posted on May 01, 2008
Corruption 2.0: The Next Problem Technology Must Solve was the title of Larry Lessig’s SCL 2008 Lecture last night. But, not to disappoint the largely IT/IP law-interested audience, in the event it was a distillation of his arguments about regulation and specifically copyright regulation in Code, The Future of Ideas and Free Culture with Corruption [...

One more glass of Rioja, please

Posted on April 18, 2008
(The continuing adventures of Mike Semple Piggot) From before sparrow’s fart till late into the night Mike SP beavers away producing and publishing news, comment and analysis for our enjoyment and edification. He’s recently rearranged his furniture, and to help you keep up with his whereabouts, here’s a quick run-down...

No Facebook? No thanks!

Posted on April 17, 2008
News.com.au reports that, according to research conducted by Australian firm Deacons, almost half of those of the 700 “workers” it surveyed who use MySpace and Facebook during work hours say they would refuse a job where they were not allowed access to social networking sites...

Consultations aggregator

Posted on April 14, 2008
Just came across Tell Them What You Think, an extremely handy site which aggregates government consultations and enables you to: search all current government consultations for words and phrases browse all latest consultations by department set up alerts via email or RSS to tell you when consultations of interest are published There are several departments not supported because of [...

Blogs vs wikis

Posted on April 11, 2008
A chain of people in my orbit seem to agree that a simple test as to when to use a blog and when to use a wiki for collaboration is: one or two people providing content, use a blog; many people providing content, use a wiki (Mark Miller > Doug Cornelius > KnowledgeThoughts > James [...

Taking the juice out of Google

Posted on April 08, 2008
When Google launched it’s Custom Search Engine service 18 months ago, I expected thousands of CSEs to pop up all over. That’s happened, but I’m not aware that any in the areas I monitor have made a mark. Why so? In the UK legal arena I know of only a few CSEs: I put together a number [...

They?re working for us (dot org)

Posted on March 26, 2008
The folks at mySociety are really moving on Society 2.0. mySociety is a charity which builds natty Web 2.0 sites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. It also aims to teach the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to most efficiently use the internet to [...

Who?s driving Gov 2.0?

Posted on March 14, 2008
We’re fortunate to have a new encumbent as Minister for Transformational Government at the Cabinet Office who really gets it - Westminster über-blogger, Tom Watson. His vision is encapsulated in his recent speech at the Transformational Government Event...

What is Enterprise 2.0?

Posted on March 14, 2008
Fred Cavazza has an extremely informative primer for those interested in applying Web 2.0 within their organisation.

Our data should be free

Posted on March 14, 2008
A long-awaited private study by Cambridge University into the pricing of public sector information (PSI) by trading funds (Ordnance Survey, Met Office, Companies House, Land Registry et al) was published on the side with the 2008 Budget Report. The study was commissioned by BERR following the OFT’s market study into the commercial use of PSI [...

Whither the law library?

Posted on March 12, 2008
Law librarians were quick to comment when Carolyn Elefant on Legal Blog Watch posed the question Are Law Libraries Becoming Obsolete? Steve Matthews was first up: “it does bug me that every other department in the law firm can evolve, but when Libraries do, they’re suddenly obsolete”; and the next: “this posting does take a very [...

A legal profession on the brink

Posted on March 07, 2008
Time to mention Jordan Furlong’s Law21 blog - dispatches from a legal profession on the brink: In the 21st century, the practice of law is shaking loose from its traditional moorings and heading out into uncharted territory. Opportunities abound, but so do pitfalls...

Internet Newsletter for Lawyers & Law 2.0 March/April 2008 issue

Posted on March 05, 2008
In this issue: Engaging with Web 2.0 MyNetworking Domaining is big business Will e-learning and KM merge? Data protection goes global A wake-up call to lawyers Upwardly mobile SharePoint - powerful and rather scary View the Newsletter. Register for 60 days’ free trial access...

Altrenatives to email

Posted on March 04, 2008
Further to my suggestions for keeping your inbox in check, Jordan Furlong has a few suggestions to add: Clients. Set up an extranet for each client; add an RSS feed. If you need to ask your client a question, call her. Colleagues (down the hall). Something wrong with your legs? / use the phone...

The death of the high street practice?

Posted on March 04, 2008
John Bolch on Family Lore relates the sad tale of local (Kent)  firms who are shedding staff by the dozen due to the property slump. And following their conveyancing business may well be their whole business. Anecdotal evidence is that HIPs are as much to blame as the sub-prime crisis...

Alternatives to email

Posted on March 04, 2008
Further to my suggestions for keeping your inbox in check, Jordan Furlong has a few suggestions to add: Clients. Set up an extranet for each client; add an RSS feed. If you need to ask your client a question, call her. Colleagues (down the hall). Something wrong with your legs? / use the phone...

Email hell

Posted on February 27, 2008
A 2008 Workplace Productivity Survey (pdf), commissioned by LexisNexis reports that: more than seven in ten American white collar workers feel inundated with information at their workplace, while more than two in five feel that they are headed for an information ?breaking point...

Who?s got the offshoring habit?

Posted on February 25, 2008
A partner in a Silver Circle firm comments: Was noticing that while your site is very detailed in some areas, your discussions, views etc on LPO [legal process outsourcing] are very light. Although you could say that Susskind’s views overlap here? But is this deliberate from you? It seems to be finally moving and I would [...

Law prof blogs

Posted on February 23, 2008
I’ve been meaning for some time to investigate the US law prof blog network as it’s a phenomenon that is not apparent in the UK. Carolyn Elefant on Law Blog Watch has prompted me to do so, pointing to Paul Caron’s study of law prof blog traffic for the period Feb 2007-Jan 2008...

RSS Cruiser

Posted on February 21, 2008
RSS Cruiser is a legal info buff who currently spends some time on the web looking for law-related RSS feeds, encountering instead (blogs apart) classic Web 1.0 pages that are little use to man or beast in this gimme-what-I-want-now age. These Web 1.0 pages are known as “false documents” in that they look pretty and [...

Corruption 2.0

Posted on February 21, 2008
I’ve signed up for the SCL Lecture 2008 in which Prof Larry Lessig will consider “Corruption 2.0 - the destructive effect of money within politics, and the role technology might play in counterbalancing it.” An unofficial site Draft Lessig was recently set up by a group involved in the Free Culture movement who think that Lessig [...

Navel gazing

Posted on February 20, 2008
There’s too much navel gazing by bloggers - blogging about blogging; but, as my business is legal information publishing and blogs are a key part of that now, I think I’m entitled to gaze deep into my navel. Following my interview with Rob La Gatta at Lexblog, I’ve been thinking more about the questions he posed...

Cool legal info tools

Posted on February 20, 2008
A roundup of recent legal info tools that have come to my attention but not been blogged yet: law.librarians is a group blog set up by lo-fi librarian: A bit of an experiment really. The template for this blog is called Prologue and it lets you (once you are logged in) blog in a Twitter-like fashion...

IPITevents

Posted on February 18, 2008
Jordan Hatcher has set up IPITevents to “fill a problem” ? how to easily keep track of upcoming intellectual property and information technology conferences, events, and CPDs in the UK. As a busy academic lawyer, I found that while there were a few UK blogs and sites that regularly posted interesting events, I either had to [...

The Big Switch

Posted on February 08, 2008
More scary stuff. Just 100 years ago larger businesses generated their own electricity. The subsequent development of the electricity grid, delivering electricity as a commodity, profoundly changed business and society. In the same way, argues Nick Carr in The Big Switch, computer utilities will replace in-house facilities and business and society will be transformed again by [...

Better than free

Posted on February 08, 2008
David Tebbutt at IWR neatly summarises a hypothesis from Kevin Kelly that in the digital age anything that can be copied and distributed for free becomes worthless and that therefore value resides only in associated non-copyable attributes. Kevin categorises these attributes as: immediacy, personalisation, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment (a non-digital representation, eg a book or [...

Exposing the social graph

Posted on February 08, 2008
With the launch last week of Google’s Social Graph API we can finally start to visualise the “social graph” - the connections between people on the web. It is only relatively recently that the relationships between people have been declared explicitly on the web - on social networking sites and publicly via open standards such as [...

Lexblog Q & A

Posted on February 06, 2008
Rob La Gatta, Editorial Manager at Lexblog, has already conducted and published on Real Lawyers Have Blogs numerous interviews with leading names in the field of law firm blogging and web marketing. These Q & As deliver structured, in-depth thoughts on the issues law firms should be addressing with regard to their web presence...

DIG it

Posted on February 03, 2008
Further to my last post, here’s a Proposed Compromise in respect of Digital Rights vs. Copyright Enforcement based on “a little education, a little guilt, and a little fear”. The proposer, K Krasnow Waterman, is an independent consultant, advising or providing interim leadership to corporations, government, start-ups and a project building new web technologies at MIT...

The price of free music

Posted on January 30, 2008
Here’s a couple of truisms in the digital age: once you digitise your content, you have to wave your content goodbye users are willing to pay for digital services that make their lives easier Current attempts to help the music industry dig itself out of its hole seem to ignore the latter, relying on advertising to support the [...

The Future of Ideas

Posted on January 22, 2008
A little bit of a stir erupts as Lawrence Lessig persuades Random House to release his (2001) The Future of Ideas, in which he explores “the fate of the commons in a connected world”, under a Creative Commons licence. But don’t get too excited just yet...

Hats off to Charon QC

Posted on January 20, 2008
I finally succumbed to Charon QC’s invitation to be be interviewed for his series of podcasts - in Podcast 37, wherein we discuss infolaw, blawging and the future direction of law publishing. One day on and he has already put out another individual podcast and the second of his Weekend Review podcasts in which several are [...

Lessons from Facebook

Posted on January 18, 2008
Like many “grown up” commentators, Martin Weller, a Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University, sees Facebook fading away for many of us as we get back to the humdrum of everyday life (Facebook was a holiday romance, not the great love of your life)...

He couldn?t have said it better himself

Posted on January 14, 2008
I came across the following hilarious garbage, scraped from Kevin O’Keefe’s post about my FamilyLawPipe and translated into … what? Family accumulation pipes? Nick Holmes, a business consultant specializing in the UK jural sector, has created a FamilyLawPipe aggregating UK kinsfolk accumulation feeds with character Pipes...

On citizenship of a virtual republic

Posted on January 14, 2008
Two different takes questioning why we should want to buy into the virtual republic that is Facebook: Stephen Fry in his Dork talk column: what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago? Is it part of some deep human instinct that [...

Pimp your own ride

Posted on January 10, 2008
Steve Matthews believes there will be a big increase soon in the use of blog software to build websites. Agreed. I’ve already said a lot about the benefits of blogging for networking and raising profile. You may not be convinced; you may not see yourself as a “thought leader”; you may not want to hang out [...

Law pipes

Posted on January 09, 2008
Well, the cat’s out the bag already. Within hours John Bolch picked up on a FamilyLawPipe I created yesterday with Yahoo Pipes. For those of you who need an introduction, Yahoo Pipes is a service from Yahoo which enables you to take inputs from RSS feeds and other XML etc files, manipulate them (eg sort, filter, [...

Internet Newsletter for Lawyers & Law 2.0 January/February 2008 issue

Posted on January 07, 2008
In this issue: Software as a Service - going mainstream in 2008 Digital media and the law Company Law Forum Eleven years of Internet Law with Graham Smith Legal research in England and the USA compared The Network in 2008 Getting to grips with HIPs CaseCheck - Law 2...

All in-force legislation now on OPSI

Posted on December 21, 2007
As reported earlier, OPSI is working with SPO to bring the two online legislative services together, to create a single place where visitors can access the widest range of legislative content held by the government alongside supporting material. The first step in this process is to publish a most recent version of revised statutes from [...

The Network in 2008

Posted on December 17, 2007
This year Web 2.0 came of age. Blogs, wikis, photo sharing, video sharing, social networking, social this, social that, SaaS: all these services have developed at phenomenal pace. In particular, the Facebook craze burst out of its collegiate limitations and has gained traction even amongst lawyers; at the SCL conference in June, half the delegates [...

Keeping company

Posted on December 17, 2007
Company Law Forum from LexisNexis is the first attempt at a substantial Web 2.0 site from a mainstream law publisher. It is intended to provide an environment for the legal and business community to share insights and discuss company law-related issues...

Who goes to the top? - you decide

Posted on November 30, 2007
The ABA Journal Blawg 100 are “the 100 best Web sites by lawyers, for lawyers, as chosen by the editors of the ABA Journal.” Kevin O’Keefe reacts to this with a star post Law Blog vanity contests : ABA adds to the silliness: to get sucked into believing a contest like the ABA Journal’s 100 best lawyer [...

An optimal copyright term

Posted on November 30, 2007
Victor Keegan in How long should copyright last? covers the arguments for a shorter copyright term in the digital age. To exemplfy the absurdity of a strict application of copyrights, he points to Nate Andersen who reports that John Tehranian, a law professor at the University of Utah, totted up all the infringements he might have [...