February 2009

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Lawyer comment spam

26 February 2009 in SEO, Spam | 14 comments

Denver Personal Injury Lawyer | sharonsmith333@yahoo.com | osullivan-law-firm.com | IP: 72.70.201.98 wrote:

I really enjoyed your post. I will have to come back again to read some more of them.

Dear Sharon

I’m so pleased you not only visited my blog but took the time and trouble to comment so incisively. I’m sure all my readers are keen to know about irrelevant Denver Personal Injury Law so I’ve prepared this special post to point them to you and also to ensure that all those Googling clueless Denver Personal Injury Lawyer will benefit similarly.

Best wishes for you future success. And if you ever need SEO advice, be sure to call.

Regards

Nick

PS. Your site is terrific. When I have an accident in Denver I’ll definitely visit again.

The end of print?

25 February 2009 in Law publishing | 6 comments

We’ve been here before and each time the answer is no. There’s too much in favour of print to bury it prematurely.

However, we know that particular types of print are under severe threat. The continuing decline of newsprint in particular is well documented.

But what of legal publications? Law journals, particularly the scholarly, look set for an early grave. According to a recent report on Law Review Circulation by Ross E. Davies of George Mason University School of Law, per Inside Higher Ed, the circulation of Harvard Law Review, for example, has declined from 8,760 in 1980 through 4,367 in 1998 to 2,610 in 2008. That’s a whopping 70% decline over the longer period and 40% in the last 10 years.

As if natural attrition wasn’t enough, Law Librarian Blog reports on the 11 February Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship signed by a dozen leading US law profs who are actively calling for the end:

The undersigned believe that it will benefit legal education and improve the dissemination of legal scholarly information if law schools commit to making the legal scholarship they publish available in stable, open, digital formats in place of print. … If stable, open, digital formats are available, law schools should stop publishing law journals in print and law libraries should stop acquiring print law journals. We believe that, in addition to their other benefits, these changes are particularly timely in light of the financial challenges currently facing many law schools.

The current economic downturn will also spell the end for many other print publications that have been struggling to show a profit. In a recent poll the Law Librarian Blog found that 89% of respondent law librarians (42% law firm, 40% academic, 14% public) had already experienced or were expecting budget cuts averaging 10%. 82% of the cuts were expected to be applied to their collections budgets – implying an average collections cut of 7% or so. Given how the economy is tanking, that 7% cut looks highly optimistic to me.

And where are those cutbacks going to bite most? Where online equivalents are already paid for out of the budget or where free access materials might substitute, print will suffer severely. For me that says an acceleration in the decline of printed law reports, looseleaf encyclopedias and periodicals.

What will be left? Why the practice book, shorn of all appendices. That’s where the enduring value is.

Chain Matrix 2

20 February 2009 in eConveyancing

Neo and the rebel leaders estimate that they have 72 hours until 250,000 probes discover Zion and destroy it and its inhabitants. During this, Neo must decide how he can save Trinity from a dark fate in his dreams. – The Matrix Reloaded [aka 2]

Back in the real world Land Registry is offering to support developers and commercial enterprises that want to develop Chain Matrix and EFT type services.

Per Michael Cross:

the move reflects the government’s “Power of Information” agenda, which encourages public bodies to make their core information freely available to developers of “value-added” information services, rather than trying to do everything themselves.

Peter Collis, chief land registrar and chief executive of Land Registry, defended the original move to develop the system: “Land Registry’s decision to launch Chain Matrix was taken at a time when no private investor was prepared to be the first to establish such a wide-ranging cross-industries initiative.” By “seeding the market with the prototype” and “developing good examples of technical functionality”, the registry had paved the way for the private sector, Collis said.

But rather than looking on it as “such a wide-ranging cross-industries initiative” (for which read “expensive, complex system”), would it be fanciful of me to suggest one could knock up a cheap, lightweight, scalable Web 2.0 app that crowd-sourced the data? You might think this was an absolute non-starter given that the (£4.6m) pilot was shelved last April due to test user apathy and privacy concerns.

Per Michael Cross again:

Conveyancers were reluctant to try it out, partly because there own case management systems did not plug in: there was no time to build the planned XML-coded interfaces to the software. The trial also found no evidence that people would pay to use the service, undermining the business case.

Privacy may also have been a worry: “Many citizens were either not aware or not convinced of the benefits of Chain Matrix and many prevented their conveyancer from entering their transactions onto Chain Matrix,” the evaluation says. In the event, only 200 out of 1,467 clients who signed up to view the matrix did so.

But I’m wondering what result you’d achieve if, instead of asking 1,467 conveyancing stakeholders (who then asked their clients) to participate in a complex pilot, you went viral with a dead simple app, reaching 700,000 or more house sellers directly? Might pigs fly?

I have a spec on the back of an envelope if anyone’s interested.

Your blog is your brand

18 February 2009 in Blogging | 3 comments

In two recent posts Kevin O’Keefe follow-ups on why a law blog does not belong inside your law firm website, on which I’ve already commented.

He confirms his view, concerns about maintaining the law firm’s brand notwithstanding:

A brand for a good lawyer is not about design, collars, logo’s and the like. If lawyers known as authorities in a niche leave a firm, where do you think the clients needing work on that niche area are going? Do you think the clients are staying because of a branded color, design, and logo? Hardly. Blogs outside of websites get cited more often. Why? Because they are viewed more credibly.

and pointing out that word of mouth generated reputation generated by a blog is far greater when the blog is away from the website

It shows your audience you are nor afraid to enter into a conversation and to share of yourself without saying see how great I am, see my 1-800 phone number, etc. Law blogs inside a website get cited a lot less than blogs outside a website free of all the marketing spin. Law blogs outside a website are far more likely to be referenced in social media (twitter etc) and have their contact syndicated to major news sources … I suppose law blogs inside a website could do the same, they just don’t.

I agree on both counts. However, it’s not really about whether a blog is “inside” or “outside” a firm website, but about the blog having a distinctive focus and along with that a distinctive identity. The blog is the brand; let it shine through.

Having said that, I’d like Kevin to look at his own blog which has two strands of posts: a) his Real Lawyers Have Blogs comment and analysis; and b) the promotion of the LexBlog network of law blogs via News from the LexBlogosphere. I’m loyal to brand A; brand B dilutes it.

Twitter as a feed aggregator

12 February 2009 in Twitter | 1 comment

A couple of months back OPSI set up a Twitter account for @legislation, feeding it with the OPSI new legislation feeds. That will reach out to a wider audience than the feeds themselves, but I wonder what that wider audience will make of it. Evidence is as yet scant (samples: “Wow, this is cool – if somewhat indigestible”; “a fascinating feed. Whoever knew so much law was going on!”)

@HMGOV is an unofficial Twitter aggregation of official news feeds from UK Government put together by Justin Kerr-Stevens who blogs at Extended Reach. That’s been going 11 months now, has churned out over 18,000 tweets and attracted a steady flow of responses.

There must be many such aggregations. It’s difficult to judge how useful they are to others. As for me, I’ll track the feeds I want to follow in Google Reader and can’t see that I would find any value in following someone else’s Twitter account for this. But others are not like me and a Twitter feed aggregation will provide value for some.

My own stab at this is @lawtweets which aggregates a few useful law news feeds. Dead simple, but I hope reasonably effective in delivering some useful updates to intersperse the chat and perhaps spark some retweets or comments. Since starting it, I have canned the feeds from those of little value.

An issue I have with this lark is that it is wide open to abuse. It’s an invitation to spam artists. And, even used for legitimate purposes, the more users who feed feeds into Twitter, the sooner the pipes will clog up. Worse is the nightmare vision of the endless loops that would be created if feeds from Twitter accounts were piped into the same Twitter accounts – though maybe Twitter is clever enough to block that sort of tactic. Must test that one soon.

Others have similar fears.

Valuing complexity

11 February 2009 in Document automation | 1 comment

Thanks to Prism Legal for pointing to an analysis that gives the lie to the assertion that complex legal documents cannot be “packaged” (if not “commoditised”).

KIIAC are specialists who “create standard templates with clause alternatives for high quality, rapid document drafting”:

As part of our work to create document templates automatically, quantify differences among like documents, and develop very accurate searches for transactional documents, our research has discovered an interesting correlation: the more complex the transaction, the more likely the document consists of standard terms and conditions.

The table below shows a range of agreements and their consistency, measured by document structure commonality and clause language consistency. We base our analysis on 250-500 publicly available samples of each document type. We need to increase the sample set but the early trends of consistency from the document collection are emerging from our research:

Document Type Consistency
Interest Rate Swap Agreement 97%
Merger Agreement 90%
Finance Agreement: (e.g. Term Loans, Credit Agreements etc.) 85%
Corporate Formation: (e.g. Articles of Incorporation, Bylaws) 85%
Employment, Consulting Agreements 65%
Purchase or Lease of Real Property 60%
Supply Agreements 55%

… We’ve performed the statistics. We are eager to hear from readers, especially practicing deal lawyers, why more sophisticated transactions tend to be more standard.

And the next question would be why then the most highly standardised transactions command the biggest fees.

The answer to the latter given by BigLaw would I think be that it’s not the complexity of the concluding document that commands the fee but the complexity of the negotiations and advice that precede it … and of course the size of the deal.

But back to the question whether complex documents can be packaged. Of course they can … to a large degree. A project I undertook more than 15 years ago was to automate a suite of will precedents: not just your bog standard wills that you can buy from any legal stationer or off the many will-drafting websites, but wills that accommodated all possible types of specific and residuary bequests and trusts, taking account of the latest IHT tax wheezes and other legislation. It was not rocket science. Being familiar with the legal jargon (over more years than I care to say) and having acquainted myself with the specific “rules” for the domain, as helpfully set out in the publication in which the bare precedents were published, with a then state-of-the-art package called WorkForm I constructed the questions that would enable the necessary clauses and variations of wording to be computed – all in one jumbo automated will template. This was not a package for the man on the Clapham omnibus, it was a package for lawyers, so answering the questions did require a requisite degree of legal domain knowledge. But even that limitation could have been addressed to a large degree with more explicit questions and more computational rules.

The point I’m working towards is that as technologies improve and as more and more encapsulated knowledge enters the legal domain, so more and more complex documents and processes can be more readily automated at acceptable cost. The standard conveyance and the standard will that 20 years ago commanded a time-based fee are now offered at £99 or even £50 thanks to the commoditisation of the process. An interest rate swap agreement will never be offered at that price, but fees charged will not depend on the complexity of the document but on the value of the (bespoke) advice and service attached to it.

Reformation

11 February 2009 in Future of law | 2 comments

Deep thought (as ever) from Jordan Furlong at Law21 on the future of lawyers a la Susskind. He concludes:

If we take another meaning of “end” – an outcome worked toward or an objective for which effort is expended, rather than the more popular meaning of “disappearance” – then we could say that this is a book about where lawyers are going, and what use will be made of them when they get there. In that sense, the book warns, if the profession stubbornly ignores or resists these clear changes to the surrounding environment, then the end of lawyers could be, indeed, the end of lawyers.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, and it’s not what Richard Susskind is rooting for. He sees a radically transformed legal profession at the end of this process, and clearly hopes that this new profession can and will provide smarter, earlier and more effective legal guidance to a much broader range of clients. That’s an end of lawyers we should all be pulling for.

Meanwhile energetic new blawger and social networker Neil Denny speaks for the enlightened solicitor:

The choice is simple and it is ours. We either engage with the debate and make a contribution, or we will get left behind. What is clear though is that the drive to changes nothing short of reformation is already well advanced. The momentum and size of the vehicle is massive and it will not be stopped.

Brainstorm on web law at LawCampLeeds

5 February 2009 in Law 2.0 | 1 comment

Jane Lambert of NIPC (also NIPC Law and @nipclaw) is organising LawCampLeeds on 7 April, which will address practical solutions to legal problems presented by development and use of Web 2.0 andWeb 3.0 technologies. I’m sure all you IP/IT lawyers will benefit. Good luck Jane.

#legalitshow anyone?

4 February 2009 in Twitter | 5 comments

Those like me who are experimenting with Twitter Search should find this post by Steven Feldman of interest. He describes how the hashtag #uksnow evolved from a simple hashtag to one which, with the addition of postcode and snowfall parameters (eg #uksnow SW14 2/10), provided a crowdsourced realtime report of snowfall throughout the UK, which was then mapped by Ben Marsh and others.

For those not yet familiar with the term, a hashtag is a tag prefixed with the # sign used in a Twitter post (or other messaging service), which is intended to aid searching tweets on a particular topic. As the hashtag spreads virally through use by others an increasing stream of on topic tweets is produced when searching for the tag. At its peak #uksnow hit the number 2 position for “trending” search terms on Twitter.

Another hashtag of immediate interest is #ltny, coined for the Legal Tech Show New York. This tag was particularly active during the first afternoon’s session on “What is Twitter and How Do I Use It?”

You could try following #legalitshow but I have slim hopes of this taking off!

Pirates, criminals or would-be honest consumers?

2 February 2009 in Copyright, DRM

The SCL has published 11 articles arising from its forum entitled ‘Legislating for Web 2.0 – Preparing for the Communications Act?’. I was rather taken with Andrew Adams and Ian Brown’s presentation on the futility of seeking technological solutions to enforcing copyright, entitled Keep Looking: The Answer to the Machine is Elsewhere, from which:

On keeping honest users honest

As Ed Felten of Princeton University retorted: ‘Nothing needs to be done to keep honest people honest, just as nothing needs to be done to keep tall people tall.’…

If DRM systems simply informed users of their rights in respect of copyright works, they would be trivial to implement and uncontroversial. However, by seeking to use TPMs to enforce these restrictions, most DRM systems have turned honest users dishonest.

On competing with free:

It is unsurprising that the creative destruction of capitalism has operated in the music industry as elsewhere to radically reshape products in the face of new technology and changing consumer preferences. Attempts to use copyright law to preserve 20th century business models in the face of disruptive new technologies, including the personal computer and the Internet, are not sustainable in the long term.

On music “piracy”:

The recording industry has spent much of the last two decades attempting to equate the unauthorised sharing of music with piracy. The downloading of music as an activity has little in common with 17th-century armed robbery on the high seas. Nor does it compare with the violent and often murderous raids on modern container ships.

Nor, of course, is it “theft”.

And on the answer to the machine being in the machine:

It is difficult to see how media players could take account of all of the circumstances of the use of a work that would be considered by the courts. … While artificial intelligence systems have made great advances over the last few decades, they are yet to match the interpretive skill of the US Supreme Court or European Court of Justice.

Singing from much the same hymn sheet it seems, at the SCL Annual Lecture in March, will be William Patry, Senior Copyright Counsel at Google, who will speak on Crafting an Effective Copyright Law. He will also address what has been called “market myopia”: the failure of copyright owners to focus on consumers, why historically they are concerned with control instead and why this has frequently led them to be anti-innovation.