Nov

7

Hard times?

Filed Under Legal practice | 1 Comment 

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 - dead as a dodo
  • Employment Law - busy as hell
  • Commercial Law - mergers, acquisitions, partnerships aplenty
  • Insolvency - booming sector
  • Conveyancing - pity the poor sods … this is as bad as anyone can remember

By Nick Holmes, 7 November 2008
Filed under Legal practice | 1 Comment 

Nov

7

Way to go Law Society Gazette

Filed Under Feeds, Law sites | Leave a Comment 

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 have flattened the site’s structure to make things easier to find, and the home page has everything we do right at the top of the page.

Yes, and it’s visually clean and very pleasing. Not only that, chums - and this is something you should make greater play of - you have also provided feeds for each of the main sections:

News

Opinion

Features

In Business

In Practice

Obiter

Brilliant stuff. Now all that’s needed is to add commenting for the opinion sections and subject feeds for your Law Reports and I’ll nominate you for Law Mag of the Year.

By Nick Holmes, 7 November 2008
Filed under Feeds, Law sites | Leave a Comment 

Nov

7

Blogging is normal - let’s move on

Filed Under Blogging | 3 Comments 

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 reverse-chronological order and allows comments and other social interactions. Viewed as such, blogging may “die” in much the same way that personal-digital assistants (PDAs) have died. A decade ago, PDAs were the preserve of digerati who liked using electronic address books and calendars. Now they are gone, but they are also ubiquitous, as features of almost every mobile phone.

That blogging has gone mainstream may disappoint some early adopters who might have wished their turf to have remained unsullied. However, it was hardly unexpected. Put a useful technology out there and all sorts of people will find all sorts of uses for it. Remember the web itself circa 1995?

(Hat tip: John Naughton)

By Nick Holmes, 7 November 2008
Filed under Blogging | 3 Comments 

Nov

5

Internet Newsletter for Lawyers & Law 2.0 November/December issue

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In this issue:

  • Does price comparison work for legal services? by Anthony Armitage
  • Alternative legal services – solicitors fight back by Delia Venables
  • Law Society Library Online by Chris Holland
  • Developing a niche practice online by Tessa Shepperson
  • Virtual in-house legal services by Katherine Evans
  • Managing Web 2.0 risk by Rupert Kendrick
  • A website as a marketing tool by Kieran Gilmurray
  • Google business tools by Susan Hallam
  • FreeLegalWeb by Nick Holmes
  • The games industry goes to war by Michael Coyle
  • Checklist for an intranet by Delia Venables

View the Newsletter. Full access + print issues by subscription.

By Nick Holmes, 5 November 2008
Filed under Newsletter | Leave a Comment 

Oct

29

In praise of editors

Filed Under Law publishers | 2 Comments 

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 atop them. … We have many tools to work with now, first and foremost the link. … Still, we need magnetic poles to gather news around and organise it. If not the article or brand or the happy coincidence of links, then what? I think that the new unit of journalism needs to be the topic. …

I want a page, a site, a something that is created, curated, edited and discussed. It will include articles. But it’s also a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides curated and annotated links to experts, coverage from elsewhere, a mix of opinion and source material. Finally, it’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but tries to add value. It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organised.

Sounds to me like he’s calling for the application of skills that have been rather dismissed in the deluge of news and blogs that has so unsettled news publishers and journalists and the clever algorithms that automatically calculate relevance. Those who “create, curate and edit” something more substantial, cohesive and longer-lasting than a collection of relevant news stories are known as editors and publishers. There is immense value in the (human) evaluation, ordering, categorisation and improvement of “content” (formerly known as “publishing”) and only now that the web is seen as too messy are the Jeff Jarvises realising that. Google realises it too.

By Nick Holmes, 29 October 2008
Filed under Law publishers | 2 Comments 

Oct

29

exCiting Times

Filed Under Feeds | 4 Comments 

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 a paid model for anything over and above use in a personal feed reader.

I’ve just used Feedity to generate a feed from Times Law Reports since they don’t produce one themselves. I checked their T&C’s when doing this. They refer to using Times “content” and as these are just headlines linked to their site, I feel OK about it, though expect a take down notice soon! I’ve also piped the feed into my lawtweets Twitter account. Having done that I’d better pay Feedity $39.

Another feed you may find useful is the Justis Alert for Latest cases from WLR. You need to be a Justis WLR subscriber to access the reports themselves. However, in addition to the linked case name, the feed does deliver the keywords and WLR cite in the description.

These and more feeds are aggregated in my Lawfeeder.

By Nick Holmes, 29 October 2008
Filed under Feeds | 4 Comments 

Oct

27

Are you being served?

Filed Under Law publishers | 3 Comments 

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 companies”? 15 years ago this was an easy one to answer, but now they range from the two giants to the smallest new web startup. We would automatically class LexisNexis and Thomson/Westlaw as “legal publishing” companies, but they are are more than that, with diverse portfolios of products for the legal profession; and at the other end of the scale, is every small player with a useful law-related web service a “legal publisher”?

My second problem is that law firms’ needs range from the requirements of the top 100 who largely dictate the strategic direction of the big two publishers, through to those of the sole practitioner who increasingly rely on free and low cost web services.

So I rather think I will have to limit myself to trying to answer the question, are your legal information needs being met? and to posing some more specific questions: Are you getting the legal information you need the way you want it and at an affordable price? Where are the (larger/trad) legal information publishers going wrong? What type of (smaller/new) services do you find more relevant to your needs? To what extent do you now rely on free legal information?

Answers please!

By Nick Holmes, 27 October 2008
Filed under Law publishers | 3 Comments 

Oct

24

Bilge pump

Filed Under Blogging | 4 Comments 

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.

I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to write anything on Flickr, Facebook is fine for socialising and Twitter is great for chat - and you can use them effectively for more serious purposes too; but they’re different tools and  don’t do what blogging does. So Paul Boutin can take his bilge elsewhere and I will continue blogging because it suits me.

By Nick Holmes, 24 October 2008
Filed under Blogging | 4 Comments 

Oct

17

Not a plug for Lexis Web

Filed Under Law publishers, Search | 7 Comments 

Tried out the (US) Lexis Web beta search engine yet? It indexes “important, legal-oriented Web content selected and validated by the LexisNexis editorial staff”, including

  • Governmental agency information (federal, state, local)
  • Informal commentary on legal issues (e.g., blogs specifically for lawyers and legal professionals)
  • General Web information about legal topics

At first it seems quite natty, with good, relevant result sets. Of course its US bias means it’s not that much use to us here, though it does index many UK blawgs.

You can filter the result set using the widgets on the left by Legal Topic, Subject, Geography, Industry, Citations, Companies, People and Keywords. Sound good? Well, it doesn’t seem to work that well in practice: eg under people, Obama, Bush and Blair seem to pop up a lot for my searches, and under Keywords, Cialis and Viagra! So more work is definitely needed there.

A complete no-no for me is that the linked pages are framed within the site.

You’ll have to check out the User Guide (PDF) to understand what’s going on.

And will it be free to use? Ominously “During the beta offer, we encourage you to use Lexis Web when you’re conducting a search for information, and all search activities will be available to you free of charge.”

By Nick Holmes, 17 October 2008
Filed under Law publishers, Search | 7 Comments 

Oct

1

Free Legal Web Barcamp

Filed Under Free Legal Web | 3 Comments 

The Free Legal Web Barcamp is taking place on Saturday 18 October at the RSA in London.

We already have a good number of people participating, but more is better. If you’d like to have your say as to how the Free Legal Web might be developed, please do sign up. If you’re not able to attend, please comment on the blog.

What will we be discussing? The agenda will be up to you, but we’ll be trying to answer some of the following questions:

  • What type of service are we aiming to achieve?
  • Who can contribute what to the initial development project?
  • What data resources are available and what are the barriers to their re-use?
  • How can we best leverage those resources and add value?
  • How can we best encourage and facilitate authoritative content contributions?
  • How will we organise, manage and fund the project?

By Nick Holmes, 1 October 2008
Filed under Free Legal Web | 3 Comments 

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