Year: 2020

Information Rights: A Practitioner’s Guide to Data Protection, Freedom of Information and other Information Rights

Retaining the position it has held since first publication, the fifth edition of this leading practitioner text on information law has been thoroughly re-worked to provide comprehensive coverage of the Data Protection Act 2018 and the GDPR. Information Rights has been cited by the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal and others, and is used by […]

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Optimising learning and development with technology

Technology based training is nothing new but the tools and techniques we now use are considerably evolved compared to decades ago. Since its early days in the 1970s technology based training has provided a flexible and cost-effective way of meeting people’s re-skilling objectives. Under recent conditions, with most of the population working from home due […]

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Using tech to defeat Covid-19

Alex Heshmaty asks Joanne Frears, partner at Lionshead Law, and Will Richmond-Coggan, partner at Freeths, about the implications of various emergency measures being taken by the government in the fight against Covid-19 – many of which are enabled by technology. How tech is being used AH. How is technology being used by states in the […]

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How we adapted to being locked-down lawyers

On 23 March 2020, the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, announced a strict lockdown due to Covid-19 that immediately affected many businesses throughout the UK, including law firms. His announcement was that you should only leave home to go to work “where this is absolutely necessary and cannot be done from home”. Most lawyers took the […]

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Will the Covid contact tracing app work?

The UK Government launched the NHS Test and Trace service on 28 May 2020 in England and Scotland, with Wales following on 1 June; Northern Ireland already has its own system. However, there is one glaring omission: the smartphone app. Although initially there was much fanfare about the production of an app by NHSX to […]

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Social media distancing

2003 marked the dawn of mainstream social media, with MySpace and LinkedIn both launching the same year and Facebook hot on their heels in 2004. Since then, social media (or “social” for short) seems to have permeated every aspect of our culture and daily lives, simultaneously bringing people closer together and driving them further apart. […]

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Will fashion tech revive retail?

Fashion and technology have long been on a collision course and, like so much, the pandemic has accelerated things in a dramatic and life altering way. It’s no secret that the fashion sector has been particularly badly hit by Covid-19. The saving grace for many brands has been the investment that it has made in […]

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Face masks and automated facial recognition

There has been a lot of debate about the thorny issue of automated facial recognition in public spaces (see Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, October 2019). Much of the criticism has been levelled at the spectre of surveillance creep and the danger of creating a Big Brother state (which has arguably already happened in China with […]

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Zoom – reducing the risk of privacy breach

“Zoom – Just One Look and My Heart Went Boom” Despite the fact that video conferencing is a very small part of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) and how best to mediate online, Fat Larry’s 1980s hit seems to have been taken to heart by mediators who, anxious not to delay mediations due to the Covid-19 […]

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Remote working in a time of crisis

Advice from the MD of Inpractice UK on coping with the current crisis, with insights from several other PMS suppliers. The impact of Covid-19 is being felt by all of us to varying degrees. People should work from home if they can but that may not be possible yet for everyone in your practice. As […]

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Electronic witnessing of documents

On 3 March 2020 the Lord Chancellor, Robert Buckland QC, made a written ministerial statement welcoming the report of the Law Commission on Electronic Execution of Documents (Law Com No 386). That report concludes that there is no need for formal primary legislation to reinforce the legal validity of electronic signatures on documents, and that […]

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How healthy is your data?

Can technology improve our health and transform healthcare? A whole panoply of tech companies are working on a range of products and services which aim to answer these questions in the affirmative. The burgeoning industry which has been dubbed “medtech” has already led to some fascinating (and controversial) partnerships, perhaps most notably involving Google Deepmind […]

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