Year: 2010
Typography for Lawyers (the book)
With Typography for Lawyers Matthew Butterick – who is a typographer turned lawyer – has performed a service for lawyers that no-one else has done for other professions. Go on, Google “Typography for” and see what you come up with. You have to be a lawyer seriously concerned about the effect of print on page […]
The hype cycle
Image: neweurasia.net Apropos my social meeja blues I consulted the web. Turns out I can plot my disillusionment on Gartner’s hype cycle representing the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies. Gartner now reckons microblogging is somewhat past the peak of inflated expectations and heading rapidly towards the trough of disillusionment, whereas “consumer-generated media” […]
Social meeja blues
Image: OLPC Time was when I was a guru of social meeja for lawyers. I was an early adopter with a keen eye for the potential of blogs, feeds and all that followed – and I sang its praises. I had a vibrant blawg with a large(ish) (in the scheme of things) band of followers […]
Footnotes suck
When I started out in law publishing I joined a young company with a modern approach. A key point in our house style, which I was instrumental in formulating, was “We eschew [nice word that] the use of footnotes.” Why? They don’t help the writer who has to partition their thoughts into mains and asides […]
The legal web – a worthy mess
Jason Wilson is a law publisher with great insights. He has a nice clean minimalist blog with great pics accompanying each post. More importantly, he’s interested in the kind of questions I’m also trying to answer, such as: Can we crowdsource reliable analytical legal content? I have given considerable thought to this problem (and I […]
The new UK legislation service
Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, September 2010. Since late July we have a shiny new official home of UK legislation at legislation.gov.uk. In due course this will completely replace the two current legislation services at OPSI and the Statute Law Database. At present some functionality currently available on the Statute Law Database is […]
FindLaw UK launches while the UK is on holiday
Just as we leave home with our buckets and spades, FindLaw UK launches. Originally an independent site where you could … well … find (US) law, FindLaw has been part of the Thomson Reuters empire for some years now and the UK site, like it’s US cousin, is “primarily a collection of free legal resources […]
Free case law – an overview
Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, July 2010. Free case law is old hat now. The House of Lords posted its first judgment on the web in 1996 and BAILII “freed the law” in 2000. But how far have we come since then? This article sums up the current position. Public sector provision The […]
BabyBarista lucks out
Tim Kevan is on a roll. BabyBarista now has a tenancy at the Guardian in their new Law section. Congrats Tim! He’s suitably nice about the Grauniad: I’m really delighted to be joining the Guardian at such an exciting time in the development of their online strategy. With over thirty million users a month they […]
FreeLegalWeb
In case you haven’t heard via other channels, the FreeLegalWeb beta service is now live.
Personally, I think we’re tops
Have you noticed how recently your site has been doing so much better on Google? Those SEO efforts are really paying off, right? Wrong! Google is showing you what you want to see. Actually it’s been going on a long while. In April 2009 Goog introduced Personalized Search for everyone. Basically this means that your […]
A new Legal Web ebook with CPD for solicitors
Thanks to Tessa Shepperson for reviewing favourably Delia Venables and my latest Legal Web ebook with CPD for solicitors called Modern Practice Topics for Solicitors. Are you feeling ignorant about the internet. Worried about wikis? Bothered by blogs? Or intimidated by twitter? You need a bit of professional training and guidance. Allow me to introduce […]
In praise of Small Law
I’m usually suitably supplicant in agreeing with future-of-law guru Susskind, but I take issue with the views implicit in his recent Times Online piece Does the Law Society know that there’s an internet generation? The report tells us that, in 2008, 85.9 per cent of law firms had four or fewer partners, while 44.2 per […]
BabyBarista balks at the paywall
Tim Kevan has raised two fingers to the Digger and withdrawn the BabyBarista blog from The soon-to-be-paywalled Times, saying: I didn’t start this blog for it to be the exclusive preserve of a limited few subscribers. I wrote it to entertain whosoever wishes to read it. BabyBarista is now at www.babybarista.com and includes cartoons by […]
Sleeves rolled up
To gauge how on the ball these ConDems are, I did a quick trawl around the Gov dept sites which reveals that … Most departments haven’t had time to do anything but post a rather ominous message along the lines of: Content on this site is under review following the formation of a new government. […]
