Year: 2009
Typography for Lawyers
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 […]
Free – radical or not?
“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. That changes the […]
Improving legislation on the web
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
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 […]
Friendfeed for lawyers
Some time ago I set up a Friendfeed account and plugged in a couple of my feeds. I did not pay it any further attention until recently I noticed a number of my band of followers were subscribing to my Friendfeed. So I checked out why. Via the Twitterverse I was pointed to this great […]
Twitter – is the party over?
Has what looked like a great service, populated by eager early adopters with like motivations turned into a service polluted by egotists, marketeers and spam artists? Larry Bodine, questioning the value of Twitter as a marketing tool for lawyers, thinks so: I’ve learned that it is a shouting post for relentless self-promoters, a dumping ground […]
Dead blogs
Scott Greenfield has advice for bloggers who have decided to call it a day: I ask you one thing. Take it down. Pull it. Remove it, once and for all. Do this for me. More importantly, do this for you. For my purpose, you’re leaving your litter and cluttering up my blogosphere. Clean up after […]
Light at the end of the tunnel
Asked whether he envisaged fees at his British papers such as … the Sun …, he replied: “We’re absolutely looking at that.“
Rivers of …
Rest in Peace, RSS – flame bait from Steve Gillmor. It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it’s not worth swimming in if you get my drift. Twitter is a sucker’s game […]
CaseCheck crosses the border
CaseCheck, headed by Stephen Moore, has since late 2007 been delivering case summaries from the Scottish Courts and EAT in a Web 2.0 environment. Now, in a tie-up with Law Brief Publishing, CaseCheck has added 4,000 England and Wales and EU case summaries from Law Brief Update. Law Brief Publishing was set up by Tim […]
Free Culture – the extended Remix
Remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy (published in the UK by Bloomsbury Academic) is the latest in Lawrence Lessig‘s series on regulation of cyberspace. Lessig is undeniably the leading thinker on copyright in the digital age and, though many label him a radical, his arguments derive from those of earlier leading […]
Blowing it
Plenty to ponder about the future not just of the established news industry but also of other old media players in this post from Jeff Jarvis and the numerous comments: You’ve had all that time to reinvent your products, services, and organizations for this new world, to take advantage of new opportunities and efficiencies, to […]
Martindale-Hubbell opens the doors – just a crack
For LexisNexis it’s simple: lawyers want a network developed by legal professionals, for legal professionals, and LexisNexis will provide it. From their recent press release on the launch of Martindale-Hubbell Connected: A survey conducted by Leader Networks in 2008 demonstrated the need for a private, online network for lawyers. According to the survey, while 54 […]
Moral panics
Last night in London the SCL welcomed William Patry – inter alia long-time author of 6,000 pages of Patry on Copyright, past Copyright Counsel to the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary and currently Copyright Counsel to Google inc – to deliver its the annual lecture, “Crafting an effective Copyright Law”. His central thesis […]
Not a problem
Clay Shirky eloquently states the problem facing the newspaper industry: People committed to saving newspapers [are] demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke. […]
