Too many #LawBlogs ?

17 May 2011 in Blogging | 3 comments

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Image: Jeff Schwartzbauer

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?.

Rough Justice – not so Gov 2.0

6 April 2011 in Government | 1 comment

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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 | 2 comments

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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.

Are (law) ebooks the future?

18 January 2011 in ebooks | 9 comments

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You can’t have missed the fact that Amazon’s fastest selling product last year was its Kindle ebook reader. Even I bought one. And during the year his Godliness Steve Jobs gave us the iPad tablet. Though the iPad is more than an a e-reader, as such it is of course much more book-like than an iMac or an iPhone. And there are plenty more tablets and e-readers on the way. We can safely say that the ebook has arrived.

But I’ve always been sceptical of the value of ebooks for law. For novels and other linear reading they clearly work well. But law books are different aren’t they? We dip into them, approach them via indexes etc, jump back and forth and put bookmarks and sticky notes on them; and they’re constantly being updated. I’ve long held that ebooks are not the future of law books or rather that the future law book is not a book, and others agree that law books belong in the cloud.

There are plenty of popular and student law ebooks in the Kindle Store, and LexisNexis is starting to release law practice books in ebook format, with titles from Sweet & Maxwell to follow. But to think that heavyweight annuals or looseleafs with updating services are going to translate into ebook formats is crazy. Remember that Butterworths’ first digital publications were badged “Books on Screen” but that appellation was quite soon dropped as it became clear that continuing the analogy wasn’t the way forward. There are many online law offerings whose principal content is based on texts initially created for publication in print, but the web services the publishers offer do do more than replicate the book and journal. I’m not saying the law publishers have got it all right, but they do know that they’ve got to figure out a future beyond books; and that means beyond ebooks too.

For as long as publishers are still publishing books, there will be a healthy market for ebooks, but as technologies converge and we do ever more in the cloud we’re going to stop thinking like Gutenberg.

Typography for Lawyers (the book)

9 December 2010 in Typography | 2 comments

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With Typography for Lawyers Matthew Butterick – who is a typographer turned lawyer – has performed a service for lawyers that no-one else has done for other professions. Go on, Google “Typography for” and see what you come up with.

You have to be a lawyer seriously concerned about the effect of print on page to get “typography for lawyers” and unfortunately most lawyers are not; rather they care about the law and lawyering – or at least their little corner of the law and lawyering. Fair enough; they’re lawyers first and foremost. But typography matters an awful lot to how lawyers project themselves on the page, to other lawyers, to clients or to the courts; and that’s Matthew’s message: lawyers, more than most other professions, are publishers and should be held to the same standards as professional publishers.

With modern word processing applications and printers we have sophisticated typesetting systems capable of producing high quality, “polished and persuasive”, professional documents. There is no excuse for using them as if they were typewriters upon which all those archaic rules and conventions are based.

So lawyers should buy this book. They need to know about the difference between straight and curly quotes, different types of dashes and different types of spaces. They should learn once and for all why you shouldn’t put two spaces after a full stop or start a new paragraph by hitting the return key twice; and why you almost never should underline stuff or TYPE IN ALL CAPS. And there’s 101 more easily-digestible, well-illustrated rules and tips in this book’s 216 pages. Although there are many references and examples from US practice, it’s not difficult to relate them to UK equivalents.

Even if most lawyers won’t hear or care about this book, in a professional firm there should be at least one person who does. There must be someone responsible for setting standards? Setting up suitable templates and styles for standard use in a firm will go a long way to improving the professionalism of a firm’s printed output and save users time. Matthew doesn’t address this directly – in the next edition, perhaps?

Matthew Butterick is an attorney in Los Angeles; he runs Butterick Law Corporation. Typography for Lawyers grew out of his website of the same name and is published by Jones McLure at $25. Unfortunately, it’s not distributed in the UK so you’ll be paying a bit more for delivery and waiting a little. (My review copy, courtesy of Matthew, arrived from Jones McLure within a week – thanks guys!)

You can preview pages here.

The hype cycle

8 November 2010 in Social networking, Technology | 2 comments

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Image: neweurasia.net

Apropos my social meeja blues I consulted the web. Turns out I can plot my disillusionment on Gartner’s hype cycle representing the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies.

Gartner now reckons microblogging is somewhat past the peak of inflated expectations and heading rapidly towards the trough of disillusionment, whereas “consumer-generated media” (do they mean blogs or are they lumping it all together?) has already troughed. So some way to go before the situation normalises and we reach the idyllic plateau of productivity. Watcha think?

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Update: There’s a section of the report specifically on social media.The graph for that puts blogging on the plateau. Actually I think it’s been there for some time.

Social meeja blues

2 November 2010 in Blogging, Social networking | 4 comments

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Image: OLPC

Time was when I was a guru of social meeja for lawyers. I was an early adopter with a keen eye for the potential of blogs, feeds and all that followed – and I sang its praises. I had a vibrant blawg with a large(ish) (in the scheme of things) band of followers and a small coterie of keen fellow blawgers. I quickly figured out the joys of Twitter and encouraged others to tweet. I had set up a profile on LinkedIn, made connections there and begun following a few emergent groups. I had also set up on Facebook – not sure why, but all those kids couldn’t be wrong, could they? And then the bell curve went mental!

Now everyone’s into social media. Every Joe Blawgs, every Sue Grabbit and Run and every legal service company has a “Twitter feed” and a “Facebook page”; there are hundreds more “blawgs” (I use those quote marks deliberately and forcefully); and on all platforms there are people desperate to make as many friends/followers/connections as possible. It’s all got out of hand, hasn’t it? Turned into some sort of spamfest. Couldn’t we go back to 2005 please?

Am I just being a Grumpy Old Man? Let’s look at what really sucks with some of the social meeja (and some of the good points too).

The good thing about Twitter is you don’t have to follow anyone if you don’t want to. That’s cool! In fact you don’t have to use Twitter at all; it’s not obligatory. On the other hand it is kinda neat to exchange banter with your contacts, show off what you know, learn something from them, make some new contacts. That’s all good if you have the time to follow the fast-flowing river. Thumbs up. What gets me is the dumb people who use Twitter. There’s way too may “marketing” peeps and egotists who broadcast low value pulp and pump up their follower numbers by mentioning and following everyone in sight. I couldn’t give a FF how many followers you have. That’s no measure of your worth to me or anyone else. In fact if it’s too big a number I’ll likely steer clear of you. (And yes, Stephen Fry, that’s you too!)

What about Facebook? Well, forgive me, but though 600 million plus people (and counting) use Facebook I’ve yet to find one who extols its virtues as a professional networking tool. You have to be there just because 600 million others are there (and, let’s not kid ourselves, most of them are way younger than you). But things could change; it could get better. Anything’s possible, but somehow (don’t quote me on this) I think Facebook’s pudding is over-egged. Sooner or later users will wise up to the fact that they’re just advertising fodder.

And LinkedIn? It’s a must-have, at least for now: a bit boring perhaps, but adding functions here and there and growing nicely as a serious business networking tool. What gets me again (and this is no fault of LinkedIn but the dumb people who use it) is the complete strangers who profess to know me and want to connect. Well sorry mate but unless you can establish at least a tenuous connection to me you go in the trash can. A tenuous connection will leave you to suffer in my Inbox for a while. Real connections are welcome. Believe me, working up 500+ connections (and thence, let’s say 50K+ second degree connections) is not the way to play this game.

Blawgs? I still love ‘em. Most of the early wave of blawgers are gamely still at it, though Twitter in particular has taken a lot of the the wind out of our sails. We’ve been joined by plenty more: some great new sources of analysis and comment, many boring law firm news/update blawgs and many misguided marketing initiatives.

And then there are all these new “businesses” set up by/for lawyers on a blog and a prayer. Those college kids in pyjamas and flip flops surely have made it easy for us all to become squillionaires!

Stop by later for another instalment.

Footnotes suck

8 October 2010 in Design and style, Law publishing | 4 comments

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When I started out in law publishing I joined a young company with a modern approach. A key point in our house style, which I was instrumental in formulating, was “We eschew [nice word that] the use of footnotes.” Why?

They don’t help the writer who has to partition their thoughts into mains and asides or mains and citations or mains and whatever; they don’t help the reader who has to jump back and forth; they don’t help the editor/publisher/typesetter/webbie who has to create and code the damn things; they don’t help anyone. Of course, loads of writers – academics especially – get off on using footnotes for precisely these reasons; let everyone suffer at the altar of my superior knowledge. Get this: if it’s worth writing, it’s worth including in the main flow. If it’s too wordy to fit in comfortably, then it probably should be somewhere else, like in a Table of X or maybe in the trash can.

I’m pleased to see there’s a Facebook group called International Coalition Against Footnotes And For Parantheticals; pity no-one seems interested.

The legal web – a worthy mess

24 September 2010 in FreeLegalWeb, Legal web | 4 comments

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Jason Wilson is a law publisher with great insights. He has a nice clean minimalist blog with great pics accompanying each post. More importantly, he’s interested in the kind of questions I’m also trying to answer, such as:

Can we crowdsource reliable analytical legal content?

I have given considerable thought to this problem (and I have a greater interest in solving it than most), and I just don’t see how a Demand Media [sic?] or similar model could ever produce good or reliable analytical material.

But in the next breath he acknowledges that a lot of good stuff has indeed already been generated by the crowds and asks how we will organise that legal web. Actually the question is buried at the end of a dense post about “exploded data” (the value of analytical content).

My thought at this point is that the legal web is in an infancy that we can’t even fathom yet. There is cloud of associated information that our current computer assisted legal research vendors cannot give to us based on their algorithms, especially when they remain in walled-in gardens that don’t account for the vast and valuable information being created by users. The question is whether we will step up to organize this sea of data, or wait until a program can do it for us?

Moving on, in a more accessible post on Slaw he asks how we can effectively curate the legal web.

Curating this growing body of analytical content will be difficult. It suggests a person-machine process of locating and separating good content from bad, and categorizing, verifying, authenticating, and editorializing that content. It will undoubtedly require the creation of a rich taxonomy to help organize and manage the content for later discovery, clean metadata, and a good search engine, and raises issues from data permanency to copyrights to brand dilution. It’s a mess. But a worthy one I think.

and in the comments to that post:

I suppose the point to my post is whether we can wrap a wiki-like structure and interface around the legal web, and make it a destination for learning about both general topics and specific issues, rather than just a portal for all results that match search terms.

Yes we can! However clever the machine, these tasks – “locating and separating good content from bad, and categorizing, verifying, authenticating, and editorializing” – to a large degree require human intervention. But that intervention need only be light touch once we figure out how most effectively to harness the wisdom of the crowds.

The new UK legislation service

5 September 2010 in Articles, Legislation | No comments

Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, September 2010.

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Since late July we have a shiny new official home of UK legislation at legislation.gov.uk. In due course this will completely replace the two current legislation services at OPSI and the Statute Law Database.

At present some functionality currently available on the Statute Law Database is not yet available on legislation.gov.uk, including full content search, geographical extent and point in time advanced search options. This functionality will be added in a series of releases and once all features of the new service have been implemented the two predecessor sites will be withdrawn.

Already OPSI legislation URLs are being redirected to the equivalent legislation.gov.uk resources.

The new service at legislation.gov.uk combines and integrates:

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

The interface provides simple and direct browse access to legislation by type, year and number and simple or advanced searches.

Any piece of primary legislation or legislation fragment may be viewed as enacted, as revised (current) or as it stood at any point in time.

Any piece of legislation or legislation fragment can be addressed reliably and simply via a permanent URI scheme and any list of legislation can be delivered as an Atom (RSS) feed.

The service is delivered by the National Archives (of which OPSI is part). John Sheridan, Head of e-Services and Strategy led the development. He says of the new service:

“We had two objectives with legislation.gov.uk: to deliver a high quality public service for people who need to consult, cite, and use legislation on the Web; and to expose the UK’s Statute Book as data, for people to take, use, and re-use for whatever purpose or application they wish.”

A quick tour

Set off from www.legislation.gov.uk.

Browse legislation

From the Browse Legislation tab you can browse legislation by type (eg UK Public General Acts etc) and then by year and number.

A dynamic graphic at the top of the listing for each type displays a bar chart of how many pieces of legislation are published for each year.

On the initial Browse page, clicking on a geographical area (country) in the map on the right will display just those types of legislation that exclusively or primarily apply to the country and those that may contain legislation that applies to it.

Though the graphical elements are attractive and nicely implemented, after the first few visits the novelty does wear off and the graphics intrude.

Versions

You can view primary legislation as it stood at any point in time from 1991.

From the left sidebar, select Latest available (Revised) or Original (As enacted) as needed.

The point-in-time features are not yet fully implemented but are substantially present. When viewing particular provisions, select Show Timeline of Changes from the left sidebar. This shows graphically the various points in time the legislation was revised from which you can select the version you require. Alternatively, you can just tag a date on to the end of a URL in the form /yyyy-mm-dd for a point in time view.

The texts of primary legislation are annotated to show the effect of amendments

Search

Using the Search form that is available at the top of every page you can search legislation by title, type, year and number.

Using the Advanced Search you can limit your search in various other ways.

Full text search is not available at the time of writing and it will be necessary to continue to use the Statute Law Database for this in the interim.

New legislation

From the New Legislation tab you can access lists of new legislation published recently. Listings are offered by type for individual days, and Atom (RSS) feeds are provided for each type of legislation.

Changes to legislation

The changes to legislation facility is not yet implemented. It will provide access to lists detailing the changes made by legislation (primary and secondary) enacted from 2002. The lists will provide details of changes including repeals, amendments, other effects (eg modifications and commencement information).

Is it up to date?

Unfortunately not, though significant improvements have been made to the accessibility of amending provisions.

legislation.gov.uk still relies on the same Statute Law Database. Keeping the SLD fully and expeditiously up to date is of course a goal, and the recent 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.

There are approximately 5,000 items of revised legislation currently held on legislation.gov.uk and these have all been updated with any changes and effects on them contained in legislation made or enacted at any time before the end of 2002 (or, in the case of Northern Ireland revised statutes, before the end of 2005). Approximately half of all items of revised legislation already incorporate any changes and effects on them contained in legislation made or enacted up to the present.

For the remaining items of revised legislation there are changes and effects in one or more of the years from 2003 to the current year that have not yet been applied.

A warning notice appears at the top of the Contents list to notify you of any outstanding changes or effects to the item of legislation you are viewing. The changes and effects can then be viewed when you open provisions from the Contents list.

A permanent URI scheme

Key to the utility of the new legislation service and opening up the information to the public has been the development of a permanent URI scheme for addressing legislation, legislation fragments, versions and related resources.

For example, the Education Act 1996, a UK Public General Act, is addressable at www.legislation.gov.uk by its type (ukpga), year (1996) and number (56) as
/ukpga/1996/56

and its contents list is at
/ukpga/1996/56/contents

A fragment such as a section is addressable as
/ukpga/1996/56/section/3

the “as enacted” version as
/ukpga/1996/56/section/3/enacted

and the version current on a particular date as
/ukpga/1996/56/section/3/2001-01-01

Parts, chapters and schedules are addressable similarly.

This scheme is permanent. It will avoid link rot and provides 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.

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