Year: 2007

Legal webbery 2007

It being the start of Blawg 2007 Conference day, I had better post something lest I be castigated there for not doing my homework. A good place to go when you are short of immmediate legal web stimulation is your fave blogs’ blogrolls. So it was that I recently examined Charon QC’s, finding two new […]

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Hire me or fire me: what does your web profile say?

Two related pieces on hiring and firing employees based on what is said about them on the web: CNet reports, under Fired federal worker sues over googling, that a government worker claimed a department official violated his “right to fundamental fairness” by using Google to research his prior work history in a dispute over the […]

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My advice is …

I know nothing about UK legal ethics rules. I don’t even know if the UK has legal ethics rules. But I’m pretty sure this site would not pass muster in the US. This from Bob Ambrogi, a Massachusetts (US) lawyer, referring to the (UK) Expert Legal Advice service in association with Net Lawman. This service […]

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Does IT matter?

First published May 2007 in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers. “Does IT Matter?” is the title of a controversial 2003 article in the Harvard Business Review by technology writer Nicholas Carr and also of his follow-up book in 2004 which expands on the theme. The nub of his argument is that IT has become a […]

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The Statute Law Database – an update

First published May 2007 in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers. It is now 4 months since the Statute Law Database was released to the public. In the first couple of weeks following the launch there was a flurry of comment and criticism; but since then, near silence. Is everyone ecstatically happy with it, reserving their […]

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Is the internet killing our culture?

Silicon Valley entrepreneur and polemicist Andrew Keen is kicking up a storm with his views on Web 2.0, soon to be published in his book The Cult of the Amateur: how today’s internet is killing our culture. Leading national media columnists have recently commented in balanced terms on his views and the book in particular: […]

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What’s wrong with this life?

Last week Field Fisher Waterhouse became the first ever major law firm to open an office in Second Life, the virtual three-dimensional world. The press and blogosphere have not been slow to pick up on this. Nearly Legal counsels “Please, No. It’s just wrong.” I tend to agree. The firm’s argument goes like this. Big […]

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A victim of his own success

I used to follow John Battelle’s Searchblog closely for news and insight into the web search business. It’s still the place to go and I’m trying to stay interested, but wonder if I should bother. Not if he continues to dish out posts like this: Bezos at Web 2 Expo….S3 Data Jeff Bezos just gave […]

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Feed yourself

Nearly Legal points us to Feedity, a terrific widget that generates an RSS feed from any web page: Feedity has a proprietary data mining algorithm, which has been designed on the principles of self-learning agents. The native parser performs low-level content analysis, and it picks-up the most “prominent cluster” of hyperlinks. The renderer engine then […]

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Long tails, short change

John Lanchester in the Guardian writes a lengthy article on the copyright issues surrounding books in the digital age. He concludes with an interesting proposal: let copyright endure for only a reasonably short period but guarantee the creator a percentage from further sales for a lengthier period – a lesser “royalty right”. Makes sense to […]

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Lawyers are necessary shock

Thanks to Kevin O’Keefe for pointing us to the Federal Court of Appeal’s decision that Martindale-Hubbell’s lawyers.com domain name is not sufficiently distinctive to qualify as a trade mark, saying: For better or worse, lawyers are necessarily an integral part of the information exchange about legal services. See TTABlog for details.

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All Blogs at the barcouncil (sic)

Thanks to the vigilant Charon QC for first spotting that the Bar Council has a blog on its new-look website. That’s to be welcomed; the more conversation the merrier, I say. But I do think the launch of a new blog by such a high profile “corporate” should have been handled with a little more […]

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When all else fails

My muse being dormant, I fall back on the blogger’s stand-by, the meta-post: Following cyber-stalking and death threats directed at A-list blogger Kathy Sierra, A-list blogger Tim O’Reilly and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales came up with a proposed Blogger’s Code of Conduct. What a dumb idea. Whilst I would deplore abusive and threatening behaviour and […]

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Geeklawyer to toe the line

Hot on the heels of Petite Anglaise’s success at a Paris Employment Tribunal whereat she was held unfairly dismissed simply for blogging and being an employee at the same time, Geeklawyer has enjoyed somewhat more modest success in being permitted by the Bar Council to continue blogging and remain a barrister provided he mends his […]

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Official Documents feed

TSO are publishing a feed of new documents added to their Official Documents site. This includes the last 10 Command and HC Papers.

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