Year: 2007

Web 2.0 for lawyers

A much-extended version of this article was published September 2007 in the Legal Web CPD course on Legal Information and Web 2.0. This version was published November 2007 in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers. What is Web 2.0? The phrase “Web 2.0” was coined by Tim O’Reilly in 2003 and refers to the way software […]

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Dear Publisher – we want RSS now!

Following is an open letter to all UK law publishers asking for RSS feeds to be provided for new title information. Publishers please respond! Librarians etc please give your support via comments and links to this post. Follow later developments via the Feeds category or on lo-fi librarian’s Facebook group. Dear Publisher You may be […]

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50 plus?

As we approach the closing hours of the month, I feel I should post something that is worthy of heading my October 2007 archive. It is this: There are only 227,220 men and women between 35 and 60 on Facebook in the UK. SagaZone to the rescue!

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Blogs v websites (with RSS)

Banging on about the benefits of blogs is not the sole preserve of Binary Law. Kevin O’Keefe, leading US champion of blogs for lawyers, does it constantly and persuasively. Today he succinctly summarises why large law firm blogs beat law firm websites with RSS feeds.

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Campaign for law publishers’ RSS feeds

Steve Matthews of Stem shows “how useful RSS can be outside the personal reader” with LegalPubs.ca, “a one stop showcase of the products offered by Canadian legal publishers”. Using RSS technology, I have mixed the 10 latest items for each of the publishers … Each entry is passed along unmodified from the publisher’s original feed, […]

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Susskind 2.0 – the digested read

In the second extract from his forthcoming book, The End of Lawyers?, published in Times Online, Richard Susskind revisits his predictions in 1996’s The Future of Law: I argued that … many of our fundamental assumptions about the nature of legal service and the nature of legal process would be challenged by the coming of […]

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Feeding the five thousand (2)

Lo-fi librarian bemoans the lack of RSS feeds for new title information from the law publishers. Feeds for new titles and editions is such a no brainer, in my view everyone would benefit, there is less chance of a new text being overlooked and ordered late so the user is happy, the librarian saves time […]

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Lawyers not necessary shock

Times Online publishes the first of several excerpts from Richard Susskind’s forthcoming book, The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the nature of legal services, due next May from OUP, from which: the law is not there to provide a livelihood for lawyers any more than ill-health exists to offer a living for doctors. Successful legal business […]

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Navigational search

Navigational search – gaining access to a specific site or page by searching for the actual web address or a portion of it – is common, not just amongst the uninitiated (who you might say do it out of ignorance), but amongst the web savvy. Jeremy Crane at Compete: It’s actually astonishing how often people […]

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CaseCheck

Here’s a great new Law 2.0 initiative. CaseCheck, headed by Stephen Moore, offers case summaries from the Scottish Courts and EAT, delivered latest-first and also categorised, with RSS feeds. Selected committed users author the summaries; all users can add comments. Does that sound like a familiar formula? Yes, it’s built with an open source blog […]

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Thought leadership through blogging

Steve Matthews posts a considered article on Slaw on Thought Leadership – the selling of ‘expertise’ that has always been a crucial element to legal marketing – through blogging: The results that can be achieved … have been repeatedly demonstrated with current blogging leaders, and are difficult to refute: Increased media exposure; A devoted referral […]

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Google – the only law firm directory to bother with?

Larry Bodine thinks so: Clients use Google to look up phone numbers and addresses, so law firms can cancel their yellow pages ads. When clients want to check out your firm, they are not going to call up to get your printed brochure, they will look you up online. Kevin O’Keefe agrees but sees the […]

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Free access is not open access

I highlight again a single point from para 87 of the Power of Information review from my acronymically-entitled previous post PSI4U: It is relatively easy to suggest changes that would give citizens and organisations better access to information held by government. These include … republishing information in open standards or as web services. Let’s look […]

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Assault and battery

Information Overlord thinks the look and feel of the redesigned Lawyer website is “just nasty“. That’s harsh, but it is certainly a brutal assault on the senses: hundreds of info fragments dressed up with red and blue all over and replete with the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes (and token green and orange […]

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Opening up the social graph

Francis Irving of the Open Knowledge Foundation posts about how Brad Fitzpatrick, ex Six Apart and now with Google, plans to open up the social graph (the connections between people that build social networks). Currently the now numerous social networks all operate as walled gardens; the ultimate goal of Brad’s project is, via a a […]

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