Internet Newsletter for Lawyers & Law 2.0

Democracy – as Abraham Lincoln famously defined it – is the government of the people, by the people and for the people. Hitherto, we’ve been able to exercise our democratic rights only at the ballot box, by lobbying our MP and perhaps in public demonstrations. Can Gov 2.0 – the application of Web 2.0 to government, engaging citizens and businesses – deliver greater democracy?

I recently attended “Enterprise 2.0 – The evolution of collaboration in your business”, looking at how the collaborative technologies underlying Web 2.0 can be used within organisations. My own presentation was slightly off topic in that it was about “Assessing the impact of external social networking on your business”, focussing on external third party Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and so on.

Delia Venables interviews Heather Rose who set up the Towcester Family Law Practice in February 2008 with a specialist family law legal executive colleague. “I have set up a virtual office and rather than people coming to the office, I take the office to them. There is nothing that I cannot do or access when out with a client. I am making legal advice a lot more accessible, manageable and flexible than the average high street practice and I can pass on the savings of lower overheads to clients.”

Sweet & Maxwell (via Thomson Reuters) has acquired leading independent legal publication Criminal Law Week which provides digests of case decisions and new legislation to 15,000 criminal law practitioners.

Bringing a case to court has become increasingly complex. Cases are taking longer, requiring more information and faster access to this data, and controlling costs is a constant challenge. Today, a range of litigation technologies and services are available that can help improve efficiency, reduce costs and enhance argument.

Some 18 months ago Google launched its Custom Search service (still in beta) that enables you to create a custom search engine (CSE) focussing on anything up to 2,000 specified URLs. Here’s how.

We live in increasingly challenging technological times which are impacting the way litigation lawyers work. This article notes several ways in which the web impacts reputation and considers practical steps which can be taken to protect it.

First CPD is a new website for Irish Lawyers providing CPD online. The concept of obtaining CPD online has only just been approved by the Irish Law Society.

With a packaged intranet you purchase the car, on the road ready to drive, fitted out with full accessories and features. Other vendors supply the build it approach. They give you the engine parts, the wheels and the panels and you are expected to put it together to create a car.

March’s article on SharePoint explained in some detail the “powerful and rather scary” services of the latest version. I believe that using SharePoint to publish to the web or to an intranet may contravene the Disability Discrimination Act, as the system doesn’t publish in a manner that adheres to internationally-recognised accessibility guidelines.

Access the May 2008 issue PDF (subscribers only).

Back in the early days of the internet, much of the debate within law firms was around whether they should have a website and, if so, then who was going to look at it. Was it even appropriate for lawyers to have a website, was it demeaning for professionals to use these types of technologies and should there be biographies and direct contact details for partners? Today those arguments are viewed as irrelevant.

The word “networking” usually evokes those awkward moments at conferences when you’re standing alone in the crowd, sipping a coffee and wondering when to leave. That awkwardness comes from not having any known basis for politely introducing yourself. Even a single item of information about another person can be enough to show that you are interdependent and thus two nodes in a social network, rather than merely attendees at the same event. The joy of the internet is that it enables you to discover these interdependencies without the restrictions of time, venue or direct human intervention.

There is a tendency to label anyone who is in the business of making money out of domain names a cybersquatter, and in the process to regard them as guilty of fast practice verging on the fraudulent. But is it appropriate to regard the growing body of entrepreneurs, known as “domainers”, whose livelihood turns on building up large portfolios of domain names, cybersquatters?. Although some domainers may well be cybersquatters, many of them are not cybersquatters in the sense in which the term is generally understood in the law.

For many areas of know-how deployment, firms can make use of techniques already in use in their organisation for training, and combine them with the access to legal research that today’s enterprise search engines make easy. This will make know-how easier and quicker to extract from its current holders, and easier to deploy to users at the time they need it.