Year: 2008
Our data should be free
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?
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 […]
A legal profession on the brink
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. Most of the old rules won’t apply anymore, while some will matter […]
Alternatives to email
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. Cooperation. […]
The death of the high street practice?
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. Who agrees? Who disagrees? Who […]
Email hell
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.” The survey of 650 white collar and knowledge workers found that employees […]
Who’s got the offshoring habit?
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 […]
Law prof blogs
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. Here’s the […]
RSS Cruiser
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
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 […]
Navel gazing
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 […]
Cool legal info tools
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 […]
IPITevents
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 […]
The Big Switch
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 […]
Better than free
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 […]
