International Law

A new Legal Web ebook with CPD for solicitors

Posted on June 12, 2010
Thanks to Tessa Shepperson for reviewing favourably Delia Venables and my latest Legal Web ebook with CPD for solicitors called Modern Practice Topics for Solicitors. Are you feeling ignorant about the internet. Worried about wikis? Bothered by blogs? Or intimidated by twitter? You need a bit of professional training and guidance...

In praise of Small Law

Posted on June 10, 2010
I’m usually suitably supplicant in agreeing with future-of-law guru Susskind, but I take issue with the views implicit in his recent Times Online piece Does the Law Society know that there?s an internet generation? The report tells us that, in 2008, 85...

BabyBarista baulks at the paywall

Posted on May 29, 2010
Tim Kevan has raised two fingers to the Digger and withdrawn the BabyBarista blog from The soon-to-be-paywalled Times, saying: I didn?t start this blog for it to be the exclusive preserve of a limited few subscribers. I wrote it to entertain whosoever wishes to read it...

Sleeves rolled up

Posted on May 13, 2010
To gauge how on the ball these ConDems are, I did a quick trawl around the Gov dept sites which reveals that … Most departments haven’t had time to do anything but post a rather ominous message along the lines of: Content on this site is under review following the formation of a new government...

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Social meejah - just for kids?

Posted on April 09, 2010
Head on over to Stem where Jordan Furlong is penning a series of posts on Social Media for Lawyers. He kicked off with Facebook for law firms. And has followed that up with Twitter for law firms. These look at how law firms can use social media effectively to promote the firm...

A tale of two professions

Posted on April 08, 2010
Legal Research Plus comments on an article about John West [founder of West Publishing] and other non lawyers who have revolutionized legal research. Apparently West called for neutral citations way back in 1908. The author of the article, Prof Robert Jarvis, asks: how a man who did not go to college, and was untrained in law, was able [...

Yes, we have no posts

Posted on April 08, 2010
Since I’ve failed dismally to engage my fanbase recently by posting anything at all, I’ve concocted a piece of fluff for your delectation. I was intrigued that one of my fave blogs, Lords of the Blog, should post thus on 6 April: New blog developments?no posts until 7 April Sounds like an April Fools posted five days late...

Tired of blogging? - tired of life

Posted on March 10, 2010
I’m more than happy that, as the Pew Foundation reports, the chatter has moved elsewhere: Since 2006, blogging has dropped among teens and young adults while simultaneously rising among older adults. As the tools and technology embedded in social networking sites change, and use of the sites continues to grow, youth may be exchanging ?macro-blogging? for [...

Wexisberg - is three a crowd?

Posted on February 22, 2010
Across the pond Bloomberg has had the effrontery brazenly to challenge the Wexis duopoly with Bloomberg Law. Bob Ambrogi has written an extended review of Bloomberg Law on Law.com. He reports that to bring itself up to competitive speed, Bloomberg hired an army of some 500 lawyers and has them nose to the grindstone writing headnotes, tagging [...

FreeLegalWeb ? dreaming on

Posted on January 31, 2010
What follows is an account of the development of FreeLegalWeb ? a collaborative project designed to join up and make sense of publicly accessible law and authored commentary, and to encourage ongoing contribution and participation, for the benefit of lawyers, advisers and the public at large...

Crown Commons

Posted on January 26, 2010
With the launch of the data.gov.uk beta website - providing access to over 2,500 central government datasets - comes a new licensing model for government information which it is intended will be launched government-wide by the end of May 2010 to replace the existing “Click-Use” licence...

Are blawgs an effective marketing tool?

Posted on January 13, 2010
I won’t get into marketing theory here (being unqualified to pontificate on the topic), but will restate my firm belief - supported by most genuine blawgers - that a blog “works”, ie it engages effectively, raises profile and is good for business, if it expresses a genuine personal voice...

More on Legal Opinions on Google Scholar

Posted on December 09, 2009
From the Law Librarian Blog on a one and a half hour interview with Google engineer Anurag Acharya on the Law Librarian Blog Talk Radio looking into Google Scholar Legal Opinions and Journals: Google designed this for people who know how to use Google at the very least, and to be successful with mining cases with [...

Can Google tame the law?

Posted on December 04, 2009
I recently posted on the FreeLegalWeb blog about Legal Opinions on Google Scholar. This was principally to question the assertion that the new service will empower the average citizen. But there are bigger questions to answer about Google’s ability meaningfully to address the needs of legal researchers...

Why pretty print is bad for the web

Posted on November 23, 2009
Here’s another of my beefs: publishing PDF on the web is lazy, bad practice. PDF - portable document format - what does that mean? It means, here’s what you want to print … in a file. It’s a portable print format; not a native web document format and not an open document format...

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...

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...

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 [...

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