Data protection intrigue

13 April 2012 in Law publishing, ebooks | No comments

I was intrigued to see that DLA Piper has just published Data Protection Laws of the World. This 274-page PDF handbook “offers a high-level snapshot of national data protection laws as they currently stand in 58 jurisdictions across the world. It provides a quick overview of the aspects of data protection law that are often of great practical significance to businesses. International data transfer restrictions, security obligations and breach notification requirements are among the topics covered.” It is offered for free download and promises to be updated frequently. You can subscribe to updates which I must assume is also a free service. What DLA Piper gets of course is to develop client relationships.

Meanwhile, Sweet & Maxwell continue to publish Data Protection Laws of the World (yes, sic, indeed) in looseleaf format in two-volumes (so, let us guess 1500 pages or so). Edited by Marcus Tearle ex of FFW and now Consultant Counsel to Charles Russell, it covers the data protection legislation of over 60 countries, is updated twice a year and will set you back £752 with year 1 updating, followed by (currently) £742 per annum for updating (yes, you read that correctly).

Crazy, no?

It should be clear from the page extents that the Sweet & Maxwell work is more in depth and that’s of course because it is aimed at lawyers, whereas the DLA Piper work is aimed at their clients and potential clients. It’s now commonplace for firms to publish free guides for their own market, so this one should come as no surprise. What is surprising is that DLA should choose a title identical to that of the long-established S&M publication.

Crazy too is the pricing of the S&M product. We know that this is high value information being purchased in the main by well-heeled firms, but that does not mean it is infinitely price-insensitive. For many years S&M have been increasing print publication prices by several percentage points above inflation, continually chasing the same absolute short-term returns from an ever-shrinking subscriber base, to the point where some of their print publications (especially looseleafs) may well have doubled in price in real terms since the turn of the century. This has to end sometime soon. Some print will die; will digital ride to the rescue?

In this case that’s an ironic question. S&M’s Data Protection Laws of the World was originally conceived as a parallel-published print + digital (CD) product. I know: we (infolaw) produced both. But the CD was soon pulled.

Now, a dozen years later, S&M are trumpeting the benefits of eBooks, but I look in vain to find Data Protection Laws of the World on their list of  ProView eBooks. The titles in the list are all best-selling hardback publications. That’s a logical place to start, but it begs the question whether low volume loosleaf titles, having been driven into the ground through aggressive pricing, will be given the new digital life they deserve. Can the ugly ducklings transform into swans? Might pigs fly?

Image: The Famous Data Protection Bin by otzberg

Scooping up work online with the “long tail”

22 February 2012 in SEO | 1 comment

I received a Press Release today. Normally these go straight in the bin, but this one grabbed my attention as it was good advice and the accompanying Top 10 SEO tips are spot on.

Research carried out by digital marketing specialists Add People for leading Manchester PR agency RMS shows that law firms are more likely to attract and convert clients searching for niche phrases than generic searches (ie by targeting the so-called “long tail”).

Grant Barton, managing director of Add People, said:

Too many firms focus on being found for the wrong keywords. Being number one in Google for “London law firm” doesn’t convert as many clients as being number one for something more niche like “dispute with fellow directors” if you’re a business lawyer. …

To give a simple analogy, someone searching for “shoes” is going to be less likely to be in buying mode than someone searching for “size ten tennis shoes”. Law firms need to get to grips with the habits of internet users and ensure their services are easily found through SEO tactics.

The top SEO tips:

1) Generate fresh content for your website on a daily basis

2) Focus on getting links back to your site from a diversity of different sites and blogs

3) Use social media to ‘seed’ your content across the web

4) Use keyword rich URLs for each page of your site

5) Have unique page descriptions and titles for each page of your site

6) Register your firm with Google Places so you can be found on map searches

7) Create a blog and link back to your main site

8) Encourage happy clients to link back to your own website by giving them useful content

9) Create short videos relevant to your work and ensure they are tagged with target keywords

10) Ensure an analytics package is installed so you can track all the visitors to your site

Image: Tamar

The search engines will find you

8 February 2012 in SEO | 2 comments

shingle siding

By far the best advice I have seen recently on SEO for law firms (well for anyone really) comes from North American legal web gurus Steve Matthews of Stem Legal and Robert Ambrogi in their article Optimizing Your Online Shingle: On-Page and Off-Page Best Practices published in the ABA’s Law Practice Magazine last summer.

The pretty PDF version is also on JD Supra.

Their conclusion:

In the end, what you most need to remember about optimizing your firm’s website is that—above all else—you need to provide quality content in a simple, user-friendly design. If your site is well written and effectively communicates who you are and what your practice is about, the search engines will find you. So don’t get hung up on SEO technicalities. Focus on communication.

I couldn’t have said that better myself.

PS. Law Practice’s January/February issue is a bumper Social Media Issue which is well worth a read.

Image: Shingle siding by reallyboring

ICLR online – who’s putting it through its paces?

24 November 2011 in Cases, Law publishing | 1 comment

I’m wondering who’s using ICLR online and how they’re getting on? The service launched 18 October to a list of over 350 delegates that was “fairly select and exclusive due to the nature of our Council”.

Before the event no doubt there was lots of direct mail and email promotion by ICLR to its customer list and I understand there were posters up in Chancery Lane and Temple tube stations for the benefit of the legal Londoners who toil there, but I struggled to find any pre-launch promotion online. I missed the “announcement” on the ICLR blog as it was somewhat indirect – a link buried in a post titled BabyBarista – Dress Down Friday. Indeed BabyBarista is fronting their online marketing campaign with a series of sponsored posts. Apparently the Grauniad had “roadblock banner adverts” up, whatever those are (they sound dangerous), but I missed them too.

In fact the pre-launch online announcement I first came across was on InPublishing, relating to Catalysts who developed the service using the NXT4 platform.

I’m curious also why there has been almost zero feedback online since about the service – particularly as anyone can sign up for a free trial. I did and was quite impressed, but I’m not a real user able to evaluate it meaningfully. Surely this is a groundbreaking alternative to the expensive Wexis services for the individual barristers and small chambers?

Props to Ruth Bird on Slaw for being the first to say something about it.

I’d like to hear from those using it – on a trial basis or in earnest. Don’t be shy.

BAILII: Is free law enough?

27 October 2011 in Cases, FreeLegalWeb, Legal Information Institutes | 6 comments

It is ironic that BAILII, which came into being to free the law, has been called out recently for restricting access to the law.

A Guardian editorial in September criticised the status quo in relation to the publication of court judgments and called for more open access. In so doing BAILII came across as the villain of the piece rather than the saviour of free law which most lawyers know it to be. Nevertheless, the editorial did raise valid questions about free and open access to case law which deserved answering. I asked Sir Henry Brooke, retiring chairman of the BAILII trustees, for his response to those questions and the resulting article is now published online on the Society for Computers and Law site.

Why does the MoJ release judgments through a contract with BAILII? Why does BAILII not allow search engines to index its judgments? Who owns copyright in judgments? Why does BAILII forbid reproduction on other sites? Sir Henry answers all these questions in some detail. But we are left with the question: Is free law enough – are we not entitled to open law? And if we do believe in open law, how do we get there?

UPDATES:

(1) See now the expanded post in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers.

(2) See also Judith Townend and Lucy Series response to the Open Data consultation.

Google+ thoughts so far

18 July 2011 in Social networking | 5 comments

Google+ logo

I’ve to date held off commenting on Google+, which is all of 3 weeks old, because it’s in “field trial” which basically means it’s a Beta with a restricted user base. The reason for this is I think that Goog needs to load test it out amongst modest millions before scaling it up. Consequently the current user base is largely the geeky early adopter crowd. If you want to try out G+ just ask for an invite. I’ll be happy to oblige if I can; the availability of invites comes and goes.

Most commentators talk of Google+ as Google’s new social networking platform, review it in generally favourable terms and compare it to Facebook and Twitter. But I think that misses the point. Google+ is Google’s way of “managing the social space”. Remember “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and it’s already a good way down that road. Google already does “social”; it has hundreds of millions of registered users using and sharing via Gmail, Docs, Reader, Blogger, You Tube, Picasa etc. It did not need to create a new social networking platform; it did not need to tempt hundreds of millions of users away from Facebook, Twitter et al; it just needed to develop an elegant application to join up the dots – and it’s done that.

As Steve Pickering says:

this isn’t just about Google+ (as great a product as that is and will be), it’s about the fact that, with this launch Google has, in effect, reduced or ‘highlighted’ Twitter and Facebook-type functions as mere applications, powerful and important as they are, within a much greater whole, but not platforms. In a sense, they are apps without a platform and Apple is a platform without an App. … let’s not get bogged down by individual features. Let’s look at the big picture. Google is the only company that has all the pieces of the puzzle, and as they bring these pieces together, it will invoke a value proposition that users would be depriving themselves of if they didn’t join.

You may say that Goog is way too big and powerful already, but I still prefer the fact that its platform is the open web, compared to the controlled environments of, say, Zuckernet or the Appleverse:

From All Techie News:

Right now the vast majority of social networking goes on inside Facebook’s walled garden and it’s in Google’s interest to get those users back out onto the open Web. If Google can secure enough consumer uptake, then those hundred million users may well insist that they be allowed to read from and write to any social network their families are on from any interface they choose. Back in the bad old days, you couldn’t call customers of one telephone network if you were a customer of another phone network. That’s where we are on social networking today, but if Google Plus can capture enough users then it could disrupt that whole economy.

For thoughts on how useful G+ may be for lawyers, read Adrian Lurssen at JDSupra.

Innovations in law publishing and the death of (some) print

9 June 2011 in Law publishing | 4 comments

The first wave of digital products in the CD era consisted basically of “books on screen” – existing print product repurposed with search and hypertext bells and whistles. This continued online with the advent of the web. More books on screen. Same old product, different medium. But the earth never really moved.

However, one of the biggest publishing phenomena of 2010 was yet more books on screen, now called ebooks, with Amazon’s Kindle leading the way. Same old product, different medium, but this time mobile, wireless/3G connected and of course brought to you by the dominant online bookseller who is now selling more ebooks than print books. Law publishers are now jumping on the bandwagon. I’m sure they’ll have some success and, as there are no great fixed costs, enjoy some profits. But the earth still doesn’t move for me.

In academia the earth is moving as authors seek to regain control of their work. Consider, for example, the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship and Open Book Publishers.

The disruptive influences of the net have forced trade publishers to innovate as their advertisers have migrated to online alternatives. Legal Week has responded by moving from free print title to a paid-for website, with law firms paying for firm-wide access. Publishers Incisive Media won the Association of Online Publishers’ Digital Publisher of the Year (Business) award in 2010: they “demonstrated a great knowledge of their audience … and have shown positive results by truly grasping digital and placing it at the core of their business.”

And what of that innovation of the late 20th century, the looseleaf service? Ruth Bird, the Bodleian Law Librarian, writing on Slaw on The Death of the Looseleaf regards as the happiest of developments the “totally new approach being taken to looseleafs online”:

At long last the publishers have stopped trying to convert static paper to static electronic flat content. They now see the information as an organic, interlinking resource that allows a serendipity of approach, hyperlinking and content are divorced from the format. And we now have to wonder how long the publishers will continue to produce the paper updates.

The looseleaf was an innovative solution first devised by the Commerce Clearing House (CCH, now part of Kluwer) addressing the problem of keeping law books sufficiently up to date, but it has been overly exploited by the publishers as a cash cow and has now had its day.

Also on Slaw, Susannah Tredwell, Library Manager at Lawson Lundell LLP in Vancouver looks at the many disadvantages of looseleafs and considers their future. Looseleafs increasingly do not provide value for money. In some looseleafs consolidated legislation and other materials that can now be found online for free make up a significant portion of the publication. Considerable staff time is taken to file updates and complicated page numbering and filing instructions result in misfiling problems which require even more staff time to resolve. (But because the end user is not the one doing the filing, this time is usually not factored in as a direct cost of the service.)

Given all these concerns, what is the future of the looseleaf service? They will increasingly migrate online, but interestingly Susannah Tredwell also suggests that some should revert to a form whence they came:

They could instead be printed as books with yearly supplements. Changing to a book format means no staff filing time, no missing pages, and (ideally) lower costs. Another solution is to remove legislative materials that can easily be obtained elsewhere.

This is a view shared by publisher Jason Wilson of Jones McClure:

Binder-based books are awful, unwieldy, lack portability, discourage innovation in typographic design, and cost more in upkeep than simply acquiring a newly bound volume.

What do you think? Are we witnessing the end of print for law books? And what are the most striking law publishing innovations for you in this rapidly changing landscape?

Too many #LawBlogs ?

17 May 2011 in Blogging | 3 comments

In the run up to the next #LawBlogs meet there have been a few pertinent posts about the state of the blawgosphere.

John Bolch asks Has blawging become “establishment”? Well, yes, John, everyone’s at it now – blogging is normal.

Lucy Reed of Pink Tape comments on the recent explosion of blawgs in Legal Blogging Goes Boom!:

Blogging is in all honesty a little bit of a vanity project for all of us (deny it if you like but it’s true), but it is dull, pointless and blah if that’s all it’s about. There are some “blogs” which are transparently no more than adverts (blahdverts?), and which offer little of interest. But there are still lots of really excellent writers out there, and more each day. It’s just a question of sifting through the dross.

I have confidence that the good blawgs will keep rising to the top (being talked about) and the average but worthy ones will also get some recognition; as to the bland me-too and marketing blawgs, I accept their right to exist, and even that they might have a role to play, but they’re not going to appear on my radar and I’m not going to lose sleep worrying that they are polluting the blawgosphere.

Not quite on topic but kinda related is Brian Inkster’s post Do Clients search for a Lawyer?.

Image: By Jeff Schwartzbauer

Rough Justice – not so Gov 2.0

6 April 2011 in Government | 1 comment


Who is Stephen Walter Pollak?

[No relation to Charon QC's post on BBC's Rough Justice]

A long time ago in a land far, far away I reported that under the 2006 Cabinet Office “Transformational Government Strategy” at least 550 government websites would be closed, with only 26 certain to be retained (basically, I speculated, one for each Department plus DirectGov and Business Link to which information from the closed websites would be transferred).

And so it is coming to pass.

There are many good reasons to whittle down the number of gov sites, not least of which in this administration’s eyes must be that there must be substantial savings there somewhere. But if the new Justice site is anything to go by that’s all the current lot are interested in; user experience be damned.

Justice (the site) incorporates information from a number of now redundant sites within the justice system. But some of the information on those sites is now on Direct.gov or BusinessLink. It’s difficult to determine the rhyme or reason.

For example, as to courts and tribunals we now have the (huge) integrated HM Courts and Tribunals Service, but it no longer has a website. Crazy or what? The old HMCS website helpfully tells us that “information for practitioners is available on the justice website … information for other court users is available on Directgov … information for business customers can be found on Businesslink.”

It’s difficult to navigate and find what you want on Justice and all-in-all it looks a bit rough and ready to me; cobbled together without too much thought. Though there were bound to be transitional difficulties you’d think they could have done a better job. But then if you want to save a shedload, maybe not.

The future of legal blogging

18 February 2011 in Blogging | 3 comments

Image: Charon QC (In Blawg Review #292)

Unfortunately I missed The future of legal blogging last night – a discussion hosted by a panel of legal bloggers David Allen Green (Jack of Kent / New Statesman), Carl Gardner (Head of Legal) and Adam Wagner (UK Human Rights Blog) and chaired by Catrin Griffiths, editor of The Lawyer.

I did follow it on Twitter and some interesting points came up. Check out the stream at #LawBlogs and follow UK Human Rights Blog for follow up.

Maybe some incisive analysis on Binary Law later.

« Older entries