Year: 2008
2009
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 […]
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing
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, […]
Twitter redux
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. It is after all a Social Networking for individuals not […]
What about clients?
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. The market doesn’t care clients don’t care […]
Barristers’ CPD – don’t panic
Updated for 2011: In his inimitable style Geeklawyer trashes the need for CPD for barristers: “let’s bin the **** rubbish” (link no longer working). That pending, he recommends using a cheap online CPD provider. I couldn’t agree more. By far the best value in town are the current Legal Web CPD courses which Delia Venables […]
The future of lawyers
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
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 […]
Law publishing at the crossroads
First Published in the Solicitors Journal, November 2008. Also published in Legal Information Management Vol 9 No 3 2009. In the current climate of increasingly rapid technological change and upheavals in the legal profession, are law firms’ legal information needs being adequately met by law publishers? And what does the future hold, particularly as we […]
Hard times?
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 – […]
Way to go Law Society Gazette
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 […]
Blogging is normal – let’s move on
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. In essence, it is a straightforward content-management system that posts updates in […]
In praise of editors
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 […]
exCiting Times
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. Since last I wrote, Feedity has moved to […]
Are you being served?
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. Firstly, who and what are “legal publishing […]
Bilge pump
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”. This has got a lot of coverage … because it’s bilge. […]
