Year: 2007
All in-force legislation now on OPSI
As reported earlier, OPSI is working with SPO to bring the two online legislative services together, to create a single place where visitors can access the widest range of legislative content held by the government alongside supporting material. The first step in this process is to publish a most recent version of revised statutes from […]
The Network in 2008
This year Web 2.0 came of age. Blogs, wikis, photo sharing, video sharing, social networking, social this, social that, SaaS: all these services have developed at phenomenal pace. In particular, the Facebook craze burst out of its collegiate limitations and has gained traction even amongst lawyers; at the SCL conference in June, half the delegates […]
Keeping company
Company Law Forum from LexisNexis is the first attempt at a substantial Web 2.0 site from a mainstream law publisher. It is intended to provide an environment for the legal and business community to share insights and discuss company law-related issues. It is free to access; registration entitles you to create a profile, publish opinions, […]
Who goes to the top? – you decide
The ABA Journal Blawg 100 are “the 100 best Web sites by lawyers, for lawyers, as chosen by the editors of the ABA Journal.” Kevin O’Keefe reacts to this with a star post Law Blog vanity contests : ABA adds to the silliness: to get sucked into believing a contest like the ABA Journal’s 100 […]
An optimal copyright term
Victor Keegan in How long should copyright last? covers the arguments for a shorter copyright term in the digital age. To exemplfy the absurdity of a strict application of copyrights, he points to Nate Andersen who reports that John Tehranian, a law professor at the University of Utah, totted up all the infringements he might […]
Susskind 2.0 digested (6)
In the last Times extract from The End of Lawyers? Richard Susskind answers his critics. There are those that argue that “computers cannot replace legal work. Full stop.” and others who believe that IT will have no or minimal effect on lawyers. To which the reply is: Open-minded lawyers, and those who genuinely care about […]
Defining the semantic web
In 1999 Tim Berners-Lee had a dream for what he called the “semantic web“, in which computers become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day […]
2008 – the year of the wiki?
Mark Chillingworth, writing in Information World Review, posts a summary of the Information Industry Outlook 2008 report from analyst Outsell. STM and legal information providers will achieve growth of $20.9bn between 2007 and 2010 … before experiencing a gradual slowdown. Growth in the sector will be driven not so much by the information, as its […]
Susskind 2.0 digested (5)
From the fifth Times extract from The End of Lawyers? No-one who might be thought to be in the driving seat of the legal system [not law schools, nor legal academics, nor the professional bodies, nor the UK Government, nor the Law Commission] is thinking systematically, rigorously and in a sustained way about the long […]
Taking stock of docstoc
I’ve spent some time browsing around on docstoc, a sort of YouTube for “professional” documents which has just launched in public beta. (Hat tip: Bob Ambrogi) docstoc is a user generated community for sharing professional documents. Find a vast quantity of high quality legal, business, technology, educational, and creative documents for free. docstoc allows users […]
Susskind 2.0 digested (4)
Richard Susskind takes a while to get to his point in the latest extract from his forthcoming book The End of Lawyers?: The major firms may feel they are beyond the scope of commoditisation and systematisation and that, on bet-the-ranch deals and disputes the legal fees represent but pocket change in the grand scheme. But […]
Jumping ship? Sound the last post
Scott Vine, the Informationoverlord, has a smart new WordPress blog. He uses a stylish theme and a rather fetching graphic for his RSS feed. Although the blog remains at the same address, the feed has a new URL. What Scott did right is that he posted a final “moving on” item on his old Blogger […]
What’s a “legal” search?
A couple of big players have recently come out with new “legal” search engines (for the US market). There is Westlaw’s WebPlus which, “through a combination, it seems, of editorial selection of sites or domains and an algorithm the engine offers to fetch you from the web a better selection of legally interesting results than […]
Holmes way bigger than Charon
Bigger even than Jupiter. Comet Holmes is exploding and its coma, a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by the sun, has grown to be bigger than the planet Jupiter. Meanwhile Pluto’s moon Charon is a mere 1,210 kilometers across.
Susskind 2.0 digested (3)
Extracted from the third Times Online extract from The End of Lawyers? Lawyers, like the rest of humanity, face the threat of “disintermediation” (broadly, being cut out of some supply chain) by smart systems; and, as in other sectors, if they want to survive, their focus should be on re-intermediating – that is, on finding […]
