Month: March 2008

Engaging with Web 2.0

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 […]

Read More

MyNetworking

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 […]

Read More

Domaining is big business

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 […]

Read More

Will e-learning and KM merge?

Knowledge Management in the legal sector continues to suffer from three main problems: the frequent difficulty knowledge managers encounter in trying to extract the knowledge from the best practitioners; the need to keep things up to date, especially considering that legal knowledge is often most valuable in the most rapidly changing fields; the need to […]

Read More

Data protection goes global

The ability to store and share data nationally and globally over the internet creates massive opportunities but also substantial threats. Data protection, once the concern of a small group of professionals, has become a major focus of politicians, company directors, the public sector and private individuals. Data and the databases in which information is stored […]

Read More

A wake-up call to lawyers

Professor Richard Susskind is, as I write, no doubt completing the final draft of his forthcoming treatise, The End of Lawyers? to be published in June by Oxford University Press. More than 12 years ago he wrote its predecessor, The Future of Law. Then only a few of us had awoken to the internet; only […]

Read More

Upwardly mobile

Mobile devices have impacted the legal profession as much as the rest of the business world. Many lawyers – particularly commercial lawyers – have the dubious privilege of carrying Blackberries, making them contactable almost anywhere. Those particularly fruity devices are so ubiquitous in the business world that they need no further introduction. The number of […]

Read More

SharePoint – powerful and rather scary

SharePoint is multi-purpose software that can serve many business and IT roles. It can ease staff, and authorised third parties’, access to information, while maintaining its security and integrity. It can also enable individual and team collaboration and information sharing, thereby improving efficiency and productivity, and facilitating the production of high quality, consistent output. SharePoint […]

Read More