Legal Research

Basic legal research

Posted on July 06, 2010
I don't do any legal research these days, most people will say that is probably a good thing but even I can tell that this is a very good introduction to legal sources for U.S Legislation and Case Law.Don't say I don't ever give you anything for free...

My beautiful Intranet

Posted on July 06, 2010
I think our Intranet is excellent but apparently nothing compared to the "beautiful" intranets announced as part of the Intranet Benchmarking forum competition "My Beautiful Intranet" competition. Screenshots from the finalists Intranets are shown in the Presentation below...

Infographics is me...

Posted on July 05, 2010
Why does this always happen, you wait ages for an Infographic and then 11 come along at the same time?!First up is this brillant, yes really, infographich called "How does Google Work?"Infographic by PPC BlogThen I stumbled across a set of not one not two, but 10 Social Media Infographics and then just when I didn't think things could get any better I found a fantastic set of photos on Flickr from a company called Intersection Consulting I love this one entitled "Anti-social etiquette"

Back in my stride...

Posted on July 05, 2010
...I'm pleased to say after several months of sitting around and twiddling my thumbs (figuratively at least) I'm back pounding the streets of my hometown.I've been running every other day with no ill-effects from my previous and have been slowly but surely increasing the time and distance I'm running...

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BIALL Conference - first thoughts

Posted on June 16, 2010
Last Friday I attended the 2nd day of the Annual BIALL Conference. This year the Conference took place in Brighton. This was the second time I'd been to Brighton to attend the Annual Conference back in 2006 I was Chair of the Legal Information Group (LIG) and was chairing a session run by LIG called "Too many resources - too little time" That was a great conference and this one despite the fact I only attended for one day was even better...

Enterprise 2.0: the use of social tools within an organisation

Posted on June 03, 2010
Steve Perry (ex-Freshfields) has published his presentation from the recent Perfect Information Conference. The presentation "Enterprise 2.0 - The use of social tools with an organisation" looks in detail at Enterprise 2.0 and how it could be used within an organisation...

So what is Knowledge Management?

Posted on June 01, 2010
I've often struggled with finding a very clear definition of Knowledge Management so was delighted when I saw the video below from Chris Collinson if you're looking for a good definition of Knowledge Management, look no further.

Why you should use Sharepoint 2010

Posted on May 28, 2010
I'm not a huge fan of Sharepoint, having used it in the last organisation I worked for I wasn't impressed with the out of the box product. However it would seem that Sharepoint 2010 has some new features that make it more appealing to Law Firms.I'm not going to list them here, instead I recommend looking at the following resources for more information on Sharepoint 2010:6 reasons to look at Sharepoint (if you're not already)First Impressions: SharePoint 2010 for Law FirmsBased on this I'm still not sure whether I'd want to use Sharepoint 2010 to build wikis but it certainly appears that progress has been made.

Factors for the success of Wikis

Posted on May 28, 2010
The Atlassian confluence blog has published the first of a series of post looking at some of the factors that determing whether the implementation of a wiki will be successful or not. In this first post called "Technology is important but not King" the author looks at the challenges technology poses...

Atlassian User Group (AUG) London

Posted on May 27, 2010
A few weeks ago I attended the Atlassian London User Group. This was the first time I'd attended an Atlassian User Group so wasn't quite sure what to expect. One of the highlights of the afternoon had to be the free t-shirt all atendees were given, sadly having searched flickr my exact t-shirt isn't displayed by the picture here is similar...

You cant force me to do it!

Posted on May 19, 2010
I enjoyed reading a recent post on the Jack Vinson blog called "You cant make me do it" in the post Jack links to a Tweet from Euan Semple which I've published in full below:"no matter what you are trying to achieve social media adoption happens one person at a time and for their reasons not yours"Jack goes on to explain what this means"...

Will Law Libraries ever be the same again?

Posted on May 15, 2010
Yesterday brought some very interesting news from CMS Cameron McKenna. As reported in Legal Week and The Lawyer. Cameron McKenna have signed a deal with Integreon (the global outsourcing company) which will see ALL support services outsourced to Integreon...

Can internal social networks help law firms?

Posted on May 07, 2010
This is the question Lars Plougmann of Headshift is asked in this short (3 minute) video, filmed at the Legal IT show earlier this year.Essentially internal "social networks" gives users more control and choice about the information they receive. For example rather then having emails sent to them, users can choose whether they want to subscribe to particular sources of information for example conflict checking emails, advertisements, annoucements etc* This can help users manage their time more effectively as they wont be managing emails to the same extent...

How effective is your intranet in an emergency?

Posted on May 06, 2010
I haven't ever really posted much about Intranets on this blog, but that will probably change as a lot of my work is involved around managing an Intranet.So given the recent issues with volcanoes the UK has been experiencing the following blog post called "How effective is your Intranet in an emergency" caught my eye...

Sharepoint explained

Posted on May 05, 2010
For anyone who hasn't come across Sharepoint yet, the video below is a good introduction to this application and some of its functionality.Increasingly Sharepoint is becoming the application of choice for Law Firms when they think about how they can improve collaboration and the ease with which users can create and publish content.

Librarians vs Knowledge Managers

Posted on May 04, 2010
There has been a lot of discussion in the last week in relation to a post published on the ExplodedLibrary.info blog in the blog post called "reflection on KM and libraries in law firms" the author writes about their experiences of libraries that have been managed by Knowledge Management teams...

How BT uses social media with internal communication

Posted on May 03, 2010
This is an interesting post from Mark Morrell, which demonstrates how BT are currently using Social Media to present internal communications.There are 4 different tools shown in this presentation:- BT Today (Intranet)- Blog central (Blogs)- BT Pedia (Wiki pages)- Podcast central (Podcasting)This is a really interesting presentation, which is well worth reviewing...

How social media is transforming corporate knowledge management

Posted on April 30, 2010
This is the title of an interesting post from the "Many doors marketing blog" which looks at how social media is as the title suggests transforming how knowledge is shared and created within a corporate context.The article is predominantly a discussion of Sharepoint and a solution called Sharepoint Social Sites, which makes creating and publishing content on Sharepoint easier for those users who may not be comfortable with or familiar with creating content on Sharepoint...

Darent Valley 10k

Posted on April 29, 2010
On Sunday the 18th of April I ran the Darent Valley 10k. The last time I ran this race was in April 2008 and I set a fairly respectable time. Sadly this time I hadn't managed to do much training so I wasn't feeling confident of setting any sort of decent time, so I wasn't disappointed when I set a time of 50:31 for 10 kilometres...

A funny thing happened on the way home from work...

Posted on April 29, 2010
It has been a while since I've posted anything to this blog for one very good reason, the new baby my wife and I were expecting finally arrived albeit two days late...as you will see from the photo I've included with this post she was well worth waiting...

Happy April fools day!

Posted on April 01, 2010
Today is of course the 1st of April, which traditionally means a slew of April fools jokes from the likes of Google and YouTube as well as the odd law related joke.My favourite so far has to be the video below from Sophos - very funny and almost believeable!

Selling social media in your organisation

Posted on March 29, 2010
Does this sound familiar..."Why don't they understand that social media can help us working more efficiently? Those stupid corporate drones! I want to get it more widespread in the organisation but every time I hit this frustrating wall!"Getting users to understand how Social media tools can be used to improve their work processes and improving efficiency can at times be struggle...

Explaining Enterprise 2.0 in one minute!

Posted on March 27, 2010
If you had one minute to try and explain Enterprise 2.0 to someone what would you say?Well Oscar Berg at the Content Economy blog has got not one but two definitions for Enterprise 2.0...?Enterprise 2.0 is all about using technology to bring brains together effectively...

Stopping the social media madness

Posted on March 26, 2010
The Web worker daily has published an interesting post called "6 ways to stop the social media madness" in it the author suggests 6 ways in which you can limit the amount of information received from social media sites.There are some very sensible suggestions here, although not all of them are new...

Tweeting while you work

Posted on March 26, 2010
Last week I attended SLA Europe?s seminar "Tweeting While You Work" I was really looking forward to this event as it had been a while since I'd attending anything and Twitter is a tool that I use regularly although less so nowadays.The speakers in the order they presented were Dr Hazel Hall (hazelh; LISResearch; CentSocInfo) of Napier University in Edinburgh, Julie Hall (juliehall) of Women Unlimited and Julie Lewis (judithlewis; Seshet) of Seshet Consulting they each gave their view on using Twitter at work and as part of an Information Professionals work...

The role of technology in Knowledge Management

Posted on March 24, 2010
This is an interesting short video interview of Chris Collinson, co-author of Learning to fly in the video Chris is asked for his view view on the question of "the role of technology in knowledge management"Chris makes some really interesting points in this video...

Social tagging and the enterprise: Does Tagging Work at Work?

Posted on March 13, 2010
I stumbled across this blog post late last week and thought it interesting enought to write about it. In the post, which is a review of another post on social tagging within the enterprise, the author describes how nowadays tagging of content (photos, videos, books, blog post, facebook friends) is seemingly ubiquitous but within an enterprise tagging has been slow to catch on...

Social Software at Addleshaw Goddard

Posted on March 12, 2010
Mark Gould of Enlightened Traditions has written a very interesting article in the latest edition of the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers*In the article Mark describes how Addleshaw Goddard started using Social Software, beginning with two blogs for their business services team, which ran on Wordpress...

Doing more with less...

Posted on March 11, 2010
Last month I spoke at the Ark Conference Managing your law firm library and information service through challenging times as I've said in my previous post this was a really interesting conference, which looked at some of the challenges facing law libraries...

Getting the most out of Twitter

Posted on March 10, 2010
The iLibrarian has linked to a great post from Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times called "Getting the most out of Twitter" Claire confirms something that I've been telling everyone I speak to about Twitter in the very first paragraph "The truth is, you don?t have to post a message to get the most out of Twitter"Obviously if you want to post tweets to Twitter that's absolutely fine but a lot of value from Twitter comes from how it can be used to track topics and subject of interest...

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