International Law

Internet Newsletter for Lawyers & Law 2.0 March/April 2008 issue

Posted on March 05, 2008
In this issue: Engaging with Web 2.0 MyNetworking Domaining is big business Will e-learning and KM merge? Data protection goes global A wake-up call to lawyers Upwardly mobile SharePoint - powerful and rather scary View the Newsletter. Register for 60 days’ free trial access...

Altrenatives to email

Posted on March 04, 2008
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...

The death of the high street practice?

Posted on March 04, 2008
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...

Alternatives to email

Posted on March 04, 2008
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...

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Email hell

Posted on February 27, 2008
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...

Who?s got the offshoring habit?

Posted on February 25, 2008
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 would [...

Law prof blogs

Posted on February 23, 2008
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...

RSS Cruiser

Posted on February 21, 2008
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

Posted on February 21, 2008
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 Lessig [...

Navel gazing

Posted on February 20, 2008
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 posed...

Cool legal info tools

Posted on February 20, 2008
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 fashion...

IPITevents

Posted on February 18, 2008
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 to [...

The Big Switch

Posted on February 08, 2008
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 by [...

Better than free

Posted on February 08, 2008
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 [...

Exposing the social graph

Posted on February 08, 2008
With the launch last week of Google’s Social Graph API we can finally start to visualise the “social graph” - the connections between people on the web. It is only relatively recently that the relationships between people have been declared explicitly on the web - on social networking sites and publicly via open standards such as [...

Lexblog Q & A

Posted on February 06, 2008
Rob La Gatta, Editorial Manager at Lexblog, has already conducted and published on Real Lawyers Have Blogs numerous interviews with leading names in the field of law firm blogging and web marketing. These Q & As deliver structured, in-depth thoughts on the issues law firms should be addressing with regard to their web presence...

DIG it

Posted on February 03, 2008
Further to my last post, here’s a Proposed Compromise in respect of Digital Rights vs. Copyright Enforcement based on “a little education, a little guilt, and a little fear”. The proposer, K Krasnow Waterman, is an independent consultant, advising or providing interim leadership to corporations, government, start-ups and a project building new web technologies at MIT...

The price of free music

Posted on January 30, 2008
Here’s a couple of truisms in the digital age: once you digitise your content, you have to wave your content goodbye users are willing to pay for digital services that make their lives easier Current attempts to help the music industry dig itself out of its hole seem to ignore the latter, relying on advertising to support the [...

The Future of Ideas

Posted on January 22, 2008
A little bit of a stir erupts as Lawrence Lessig persuades Random House to release his (2001) The Future of Ideas, in which he explores “the fate of the commons in a connected world”, under a Creative Commons licence. But don’t get too excited just yet...

Hats off to Charon QC

Posted on January 20, 2008
I finally succumbed to Charon QC’s invitation to be be interviewed for his series of podcasts - in Podcast 37, wherein we discuss infolaw, blawging and the future direction of law publishing. One day on and he has already put out another individual podcast and the second of his Weekend Review podcasts in which several are [...

Lessons from Facebook

Posted on January 18, 2008
Like many “grown up” commentators, Martin Weller, a Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University, sees Facebook fading away for many of us as we get back to the humdrum of everyday life (Facebook was a holiday romance, not the great love of your life)...

He couldn?t have said it better himself

Posted on January 14, 2008
I came across the following hilarious garbage, scraped from Kevin O’Keefe’s post about my FamilyLawPipe and translated into … what? Family accumulation pipes? Nick Holmes, a business consultant specializing in the UK jural sector, has created a FamilyLawPipe aggregating UK kinsfolk accumulation feeds with character Pipes...

On citizenship of a virtual republic

Posted on January 14, 2008
Two different takes questioning why we should want to buy into the virtual republic that is Facebook: Stephen Fry in his Dork talk column: what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago? Is it part of some deep human instinct that [...

Pimp your own ride

Posted on January 10, 2008
Steve Matthews believes there will be a big increase soon in the use of blog software to build websites. Agreed. I’ve already said a lot about the benefits of blogging for networking and raising profile. You may not be convinced; you may not see yourself as a “thought leader”; you may not want to hang out [...

Law pipes

Posted on January 09, 2008
Well, the cat’s out the bag already. Within hours John Bolch picked up on a FamilyLawPipe I created yesterday with Yahoo Pipes. For those of you who need an introduction, Yahoo Pipes is a service from Yahoo which enables you to take inputs from RSS feeds and other XML etc files, manipulate them (eg sort, filter, [...

Internet Newsletter for Lawyers & Law 2.0 January/February 2008 issue

Posted on January 07, 2008
In this issue: Software as a Service - going mainstream in 2008 Digital media and the law Company Law Forum Eleven years of Internet Law with Graham Smith Legal research in England and the USA compared The Network in 2008 Getting to grips with HIPs CaseCheck - Law 2...

All in-force legislation now on OPSI

Posted on December 21, 2007
As reported earlier, OPSI is working with SPO to bring the two online legislative services together, to create a single place where visitors can access the widest range of legislative content held by the government alongside supporting material. The first step in this process is to publish a most recent version of revised statutes from [...

The Network in 2008

Posted on December 17, 2007
This year Web 2.0 came of age. Blogs, wikis, photo sharing, video sharing, social networking, social this, social that, SaaS: all these services have developed at phenomenal pace. In particular, the Facebook craze burst out of its collegiate limitations and has gained traction even amongst lawyers; at the SCL conference in June, half the delegates [...

Keeping company

Posted on December 17, 2007
Company Law Forum from LexisNexis is the first attempt at a substantial Web 2.0 site from a mainstream law publisher. It is intended to provide an environment for the legal and business community to share insights and discuss company law-related issues...

Who goes to the top? - you decide

Posted on November 30, 2007
The ABA Journal Blawg 100 are “the 100 best Web sites by lawyers, for lawyers, as chosen by the editors of the ABA Journal.” Kevin O’Keefe reacts to this with a star post Law Blog vanity contests : ABA adds to the silliness: to get sucked into believing a contest like the ABA Journal’s 100 best lawyer [...

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