July 2009

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Typography for Lawyers

29 July 2009 in Typography | 1 comment

Having cut my working teeth in an editorial department in law book publishing, Typography for Lawyers is just up my street.

With the advent of the microprocessor, along came word processing, then desktop publishing, then the web. Along the way regular users have been given ever more sophisticated tools easily to generate typography and layouts previously the preserve of skilled designers and craftsmen. Of course most made a hash of it and most still do.

Matthew Butterick is a civil litigation attorney in Los Angeles. Before that he worked as a digital typeface designer and ran a website development studio. He thinks that lawyers’ poor use of typography is for lack of information, not lack of will, and hopes to fill that void with his website. It’s an excellent, concise web-based manual with particular reference to the peculiarities of legal documents; but I doubt it will find its mark.

Free – radical or not?

16 July 2009 in Business | 1 comment

“Free” is a word that has many connotations and arouses strong feelings.

Giving away products and services for free in order to sell other products and services is a well-established marketing model. What is new in the digital world is how the marginal cost of delivering services has declined to near zero. That changes the economics, even turns them on their head. In his new book, Free: the future of a radical price (not free in physical form), Chris “Long Tail” Anderson explains how “freeconomics” works and how Free can be used successfully to turn a profit.

Critics are falling over themselves to pick holes in his arguments: “it’s not really free”, “but YouTube is making a huge loss”, etc, etc – “so there”. There’s a neat counter to many of the less-informed arguments which is “read the book”. Even the better arguments point only to examples of where Free fails – or rather appears to fail. But Free works for different services in different markets in different ways; Anderson does not suggest it works for all in the same way; a lot of experimentation (and luck) is required to find a Free model that works. So YouTube is losing millions; so what? Few would say that YouTube is not successful. It’s not making money now because, though bandwidth and storage costs are very low, for video clips they are not yet near zero, and in sum they are astronomical for YouTube. Google (which has the cash to burn) hasn’t yet figured how to recoup these costs. But if these costs fall – according to Moore’s law – by 50% per annum, and/or it finds a better way to “monetise” the service, maybe Google will turn a profit on YouTube soon. And let’s not forget that Google spent several years in the red with free search before it turned the books round spectacularly with AdWords.

So take this book for what it is: a readable and extremely informative explanation of how Free works and can work for you; Anderson certainly does not advocate giving everything away and hoping for the best.

Improving legislation on the web

5 July 2009 in Articles, Legislation, Statute Law Database | 2 comments

Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, July 2009.

In 1996 HMSO started publishing new legislation on its website. Comprehensive coverage was later extended back to 1987 for Acts and 1988 for SIs. Although publication of legislation was timely and presentation competent, we yearned for what had been promised for many years – a comprehensive, up-to-date version of the statute book. Finally it arrived or so we thought.

The Statute Law Database

In December 2006, the long-awaited, long-overdue SLD was published and, while it had earlier been suggested there would be charges for “added value” views and re-use, it was declared free for all purposes after all, subject only to a “click-use” licence.

The SLD contains the updated texts of all primary legislation that was in force on 1 February 1991 or has come into force since, and the (unupdated) texts of all “printed” secondary legislation passed since then – in total more than 45,000 pieces of legislation. A key benefit of the SLD is that one can view the primary legislation not only as it currently stands but also as it stood at any date from February 1991.

In terms of completeness and consolidation it was thus a vast improvement on the incomplete and “as enacted” statute law available on OPSI.

In principle, as to the raw law, it provides functionality similar to that in the costly commercial alternatives. But its most serious defect is that it is not complete, nor up to date. There is a delay in loading new legislation, a number of key older Acts remain to be published and the effects of much legislation from 2003 onwards are not yet consolidated. There is also some anecdotal evidence that it is not entirely accurate. This may be as a result of its incompleteness, but even so, the impression it leaves with some is that it is currently unreliable.

Together these two shortcomings are the killer for the larger firms and chambers with sufficient budget to subscribe to LexisNexis or Westlaw or a more specialist service such as Complinet: there is no question that the commercial services still prevail. However, for the smaller firm and the individual barrister, for whom the big two commercial services are not an option, the SLD is a boon, despite its defects.

Other criticisms concern its functionality and ease of use. Statute law is complex, and that complexity is revealed rather than hidden in the SLD. It is undoubtedly a good attempt, but falls somewhat short of delivering intuitive use and following up later legislative effects is tedious to put it mildly.

The publication of the SLD as a free access, public resource was a huge step forward and its open licensing model did represent a sea change in the government’s attitude towards opening up public sector information (PSI). But free access to its web views does not open up the data. You cannot easily extract, re-use or repurpose the data as you are at the mercy of its formatting and structure and there are no RSS feeds of new legislation.

Improvements to OPSI legislation

In 2005 it was decided that there was a need for a dedicated body to be the principal focal point for advising on and regulating the operation of public sector information re-use and the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) was established for that purpose. Having grown out of and subsumed HMSO, OPSI also has responsibility for the publication (inter alia) of legislation and the management of Crown copyright.

Since then there have been many improvements in the OPSI legislation site, including a new page design, PDF versions of primary legislation back to 1800, directly addressable content fragments (specific sections and sub-sections can be directly referenced), improved search, RSS feeds for new legislation and for user-generated searches, and the incorporation of revised pre-1988 statutes from the SLD.

Towards a single legislation website

Until December 2008, responsibility for the SLD lay with the Statutory Publications Office (SPO), part of the Ministry of Justice. In 2008 the decision was taken to merge the SPO into OPSI and to bring the online legislative services together, creating a single place where visitors could access the widest range of legislative content held by the government alongside supporting material.

Considerable progress in developing this new service had already been made during 2008 and, since the merger became effective in January 2009, the pace of development has quickened.

The development is being led by John Sheridan, Head of eServices at OPSI. John is also on the expert panel of technologists advising the government on making public sector information more open and accessible on the web, which panel, as widely reported, now includes Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

So the tech credentials are second to none, but the development has to be lead by what users want. Who currently uses the legislation websites and what for?

To inform its development of the new service, OPSI conducted a detailed analysis of the two legislation site traffic statistics and an extensive survey of their users, profiling typical users by creating “personas”.

Unsurprisingly, the primary user is the professional, personified by Mark Green, a council Environmental Enforcement Officer. He is web-savvy and a regular user, more so of OPSI. He needs to quote legislation, uses a handful of Acts regularly and has no access to subscription services. Most smaller firm lawyers and individual barristers will no doubt identify with this persona.

Jane Booker, Law Librarian, is a secondary persona. She is an expert web researcher and confident researcher of legal documents. She is a regular user, more so of SLD and is likely to use all the features SLD site offers. She is time pressured to respond to queries. She uses subscription services and other sources.

Another secondary persona is Heather Cole, a member of public seeking to defend her rights. She is web savvy but a first time user. She does want to view legislation, but needs support and advice too; she needs to understand what she is seeing.

The OPSI website attracts 1.2 million unique visitors monthly; the SLD 150,000. Visitors predominantly come to the SLD through direct entry – ie knowing the website URL and typing it directly into their browser or by visiting the site via saved bookmarks. This suggests there is a strong community of frequent users of the service. In comparison, the OPSI site draws most visitors from search engines (ie not direct entry) and has a lower proportion of returning visitors.

What improvements will we see?

The goal of the Single Legislation Site (SLS) project is to improve access to legislation by:

  • rationalising the processes (both manual and automated) used in the preparation of legislation data;
  • more effectively leveraging the existing legislation data resources; and
  • providing open access to this data via a permanent uniform resource identifier (URI) scheme.

The best of both data resources

The SLS will effectively combine and integrate the following legislation data resources:

  • the “as enacted” versions of legislation from OPSI, immediately on enactment
  • the revised versions of legislation from the SLD, as and when available, complete with all versioning and annotation information
  • the tables of effects data maintained by the SLD which will link past legislative provisions to relevant amending provisions
  • the explanatory notes, integrated with the relevant legislative provisions

A better interface

The combined data will be presented using a reconfigured version of the current OPSI legislation interface which is far easier to navigate and far more responsive than the SLD interface. It will incorporate and extend all the features recently introduced, including PDF versions of legislation, addressable content fragments, RSS feeds and more.

Effective update status

Keeping the SLD fully and expeditiously up to date is of course a goal. The merger of the SPO and OPSI editorial teams has provided the opportunity to deduplicate some effort and hence to improve the timeliness of updates, but it remains the case that the editorial work is time consuming and publishing of consolidated legislation will always lag some way behind the publication of amending instruments.

Given this, if users are to be able to rely on the SLD, it is imperative that the status of what the user sees is absolutely clear, ie what later effects are not incorporated, and that ready access to the relevant amendments is provided.

At present if one accesses a piece of legislation on the SLD that is not fully up to date, one is faced with a warning such as this (re Employment Rights Act 1996):

Update Status Warning:

There are effects on this legislation that have not yet been applied to the Statute Law Database for the following year(s): 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009. Please see the Tables of legislative effects for details. See also important information in Update status of legislation.

Not only is this off-putting (“How can I possibly rely on this?”), but it is also unhelpful and actually accessing the relevant amendments is a tortuous process. However, all the data necessary to present useful lists of relevant amendments and build links to them are held in the Tables of Effects which the SLD maintains; using data linking techniques, the new site will provide intuitive, direct navigation to these amendments.

A permanent URI scheme

Key to the utility of the new legislation service and opening up the information has been the development of a permanent URI scheme for addressing legislation, legislation fragments, versions and related resources on the new site which will be at www.legislation.gov.uk.

For example, a UK Public General Act will be addressable by its number as

/id/ukpga/2008/4

or by its short title as

/id?title=Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008

Fragments will be addressable as

/id/ukpga/2008/4/section/6

and if a version other than the current is required, the enacted version will be addressable as

/id/ukpga/2008/4/section/6/enacted

or that current on a particular date as

/id/ukpga/2008/4/section/6/1998-12-31

This scheme will be permanent. It will avoid link rot and provide an intuitive format with which any external individual or website can reliably construct an address to any legislative resource. This is not just a technical nicety, but a fundamental improvement that will open up UK legislation for public consumption.

Social networks – how they work

5 July 2009 in Articles, Social networking

First Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, July 2009.

Facebook has over 200 million users; LinkedIn, the network for business and professionals, has over 40 million; Twitter is all the rage; and don’t forget blogs.

Although these services are hugely popular, it’s safe to say that amongst lawyers use is still largely confined to so-called early adopters. Should you be using these (public) social networks? If so, which? for what?

Too often answers to the question “Why should I use social networks?” focus on particular features each service offers and for what tasks they can be used. But it is worth first understanding how they work, their similarities and, more importantly, their differences. Then consider the numbers and the demographics and the benefits of making balanced use of some or all of these services – according to taste – should be clear.

Who you know

Facebook is a free-access, privately-owned social networking web service. It acts as a super-charged social address book – a destination where you can connect and interact with “friends”, see how they are interacting with their friends and also connect to others with whom you have a looser social connection (all those in your workplace, college or region).

Post your profile, add some friends (subject to their confirmation) and you’re away. Say what’s on your mind, see what’s on theirs, add more friends along the way, set up social events and much more via built-in Facebook features or one of the countless third party applications.

Founded initially for use by college students, Facebook is now open to anyone over 13, with the UK proportionately the most enthusiastic adopters.

Although it can be used for professional purposes, it is primarily used for social interaction and its largest constituency remains the 18-25. Indeed, it is so dominant amongst UK students that not to be on Facebook is to be all but invisible to your peers.

Who they know

LinkedIn is again a privately-owned social networking service designed for professional and business networking. It is free to use but with certain extended features available to paying subscribers.

Your profile on LinkedIn acts as your online CV, describing your experience and expertise and enabling others on the network easily to find you and connect with you. All LinkedIn public profiles are also indexed by Google, so your profile becomes another valuable property in your online portfolio. LinkedIn is fast becoming the online directory of business and professional people.

You can invite anyone (whether a LinkedIn user or not) to become a connection or can request to connect with another user via a pre-existing relationship or the intervention of an existing contact. This “gated access” approach is intended to build trust among users.

An important feature of LinkedIn is its emphasis on “degrees of connection”. Your direct connections are your 1st degree connections; their connections are your 2nd degree connections; their connections are your 3rd degree connections. On every screen you are reminded of these degrees of connection and invited explicitly or implicitly to extend your network by connecting directly to current 2nd or 3rd degree connections.

LinkedIn emphasises degrees of connection because, in business, it is often not just who you know that counts; it is who they know.

What you know

Blogging is not a service owned by anyone: your blog is yours and the Net is the network. Unlike Facebook and LinkedIn, the emphasis is not on who you know, but on what you know. With blogging you demonstrate your knowledge, expertise and personality through your writing. You connect with other people not explicitly, but by linking to and commenting on their blogs. Likewise, if you have something useful or interesting to say, others will link to and comment on your blog. Blogging is thus a mutually reinforcing ecosystem of authors and commenters of like or overlapping interests.

Blog search and analysis services such as Technorati and Google blog search work by highlighting the connections between blogs and enable you to readily search across them and extend your blog network.

Whatever

And so to Twitter, usually referred to as a social networking and micro-blogging service. It shares some characteristics of both social networking and blogging, but it is the differences that are most revealing.

Twitter is deceptively simple in functionality, yet its essence is fiendishly difficult to explain. Indeed, the most common early tweet by new users is something along the lines of “I don’t get it.” Even those who have become avid users admit that it took some time before it clicked.

All you can do on Twitter is post short messages of 140 characters or less and read those posted by others. You follow those whose messages interest you and these are displayed in a “stream” on your Twitter home page. (Users can protect their updates, requiring their permission for you to follow them, but few do.) Likewise you are followed by those to whom your messages are of interest and your tweets show on their home page.

Unlike Facebook and LinkedIn connections which are reciprocal, Twitter connections are asymmetric: you choose whom to follow; others choose you.

As with blogging, Twitter connections are also made indirectly by linking to others – responding to or “retweeting” their tweets or referencing them in your messages.

Twitter’s prompt “What are you doing?” is somewhat misleading for new users, suggesting that its main purpose is to post status updates. But what you use it for is entirely up to you. The 140-character constraint forces brevity: pithy comment, banter, breaking news headlines, link sharing; these are all meat and drink to Twitter users.

Twitter is very much flavour of the year, but don’t be impressed by headlines that proclaim 20 million Twitter users and growing at 1,382 per cent per annum. Recent research reveals that 60 per cent don’t contribute after a month, so we have 8 million active Twitter users. That’s a sizeable number, but it does not make Twitter mainstream. And 90 per cent of all Twitter activity is by 10 per cent of users, giving us only 2 million users worldwide who fully embrace it. That’s not going to change the world, much as that minority would like it to.

Conclusion

When it comes to socialising, Facebook certainly looks likely to be the winner who will take all (see bit.ly/1A2z5k), but I’ve yet to be convinced that it’s a must have or even a nice to have for business.

For doing business we must look to the more focussed service that delivers business benefits. LinkedIn has always sold itself as the network for business and professionals and it is so. Despite its continuing rapid growth – with over 43 million members in over 200 countries – it has not grabbed the headlines, being too worthy and boring for lazy hacks to comprehend. Because it has focus, the increase in usage has not produced a lot of noise. Though Stephen Fry has heard of it, thankfully he has not yet found a use for it and he lurks in the shadows.

Blogging is good for business. But it takes effort and commitment.

As to Twitter – give it a go. If you make an effort, you never know what might happen.

Friendfeed for lawyers

2 July 2009 in Feeds | 2 comments

Some time ago I set up a Friendfeed account and plugged in a couple of my feeds. I did not pay it any further attention until recently I noticed a number of my band of followers were subscribing to my Friendfeed.

So I checked out why. Via the Twitterverse I was pointed to this great post on Friendfeed for Lawyers on Advocate’s Studio by Martha Sperry, an attorney in the Boston. It tells you all you need to know.