Category Archives: News

The right to be forgotten

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Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all – Friedrich Nietzsche

Like the rumble of thunder which precedes the storm or the escape of sulphurous gas which heralds a volcanic eruption, it is clear that the EU is up to something.

That something promises to be momentous. Forget the recession/depression, forget the riots on the streets of Athens, forget (if you can) the reelection campaign of President Sarkozy (who has not yet even announced that he is going to stand for another term as President of our favourite neighbour)!

All this is unimportant. The EU is turning its attention to data privacy.

Now I am not for one moment suggesting that what happens to personal data is not rightly of concern, particularly to the person whose data it is. The EU has recognised its importance and on January 25th (Burns Night for those non Scots who need reminding that our northern neighbours will be getting smashed on Wednesday), the EU intends to publish proposals for new data protection rules.

I have not seen the draft proposals but believe that we may see included something along these lines:

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Poetry in motion

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No Scotsman I, but I am familiar with the traditions of a Burns Nicht supper and indeed have in the past fallen foul of them. My wife delights in the story of my trying in vain to insert the key to our then London house and complaining bitterly that it did not fit, only to discover that the whisky had blurred my vision to such an extent that I was several doors off beam!

Back to today and I was inspired to think about Burns by an aside from my new colleague John Lapraik. I learned that in the dim and distant past (the 18th century) there was a Scottish poet bearing John’s name who was a friend of Burns’ and who just happens to be John’s something times great grandfather.

However delightful it was to live in Ayrshire and rub shoulders with the rather better known Mr Burns it seems that Lapraik’s books and poems have all but disappeared. I cannot judge whether this is a loss to Scottish literature but no such scruples deterred one James Maxwell. A contemporary of both Burns and Lapraik, and one who did not approve of the latter’s writings, he was moved to comment on their disappearance as follows:

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You tweet (or blog, post and poke) if you want to, but take care!

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“Are you on LinkedIn?” asked my companion. I confessed that I was. “Facebook?” Well, not exactly, I replied. “Why not?” my interrogator continued. By this stage I was beginning to wish I had not started the conversation, but I had been keen to establish whether this particular litigation lawyer was into social media because our conversation had been about ways in which lawyers market themselves.

When I was a practising lawyer, I fell into the camp of “being keen on marketing” but I was always a little disappointed with the results of my efforts. Fine, if you really had a triumph to trumpet about and an audience which was interested but otherwise it always seemed to me to be rather false. Perhaps I suffered from (false) modesty, a charge which my lawyer friend threw at me recently and this was how the conversation about social media started.

I have already joined the crowd who make predictions about 2012 and I am certainly not going to go down that route again, but allow me to say that this whole social media lark is becoming all-pervasive. It is virtually impossible to pick up a newspaper these days without seeing a report about some tweet, blog post or story on MySpace or Facebook. And the companies behind the successful sites are worth mega millions as can be seen by the recent LinkedIn float and the ongoing saga about the valuation of Facebook.

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In the groove

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When I looked to my right, I saw what can best be described as a white fog sweeping towards me. It had already enveloped the building on the other side of the road before I realised I was going to get very wet. The next instant, it seemed that someone had turned on a fire hydrant and directed it in my direction. I was soaked and only the sight and sound of others fleeing for the station entrance with me, convinced me that it was in fact a serious rain squall.

Coming back to work after an extended break is never easy. At least for me and most others, I suspect this to be true. It does not matter if you love what you do, it still takes time to get back into the groove.

I ended the year on a note of optimism for 2012, something not all commentators managed to achieve. Rain squalls apart, (and this one soon passed), the New Year has started with two pieces of excellent news for Millnet. Continue reading →

Postcard from Munich

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Worryingly, I have realised that it is almost a lifetime ago that I was last in Munich. Actually that is not quite true because I was there about 5 years ago to watch a performance of Pygmalion in which my daughter was acting, but, fun as that was, my memories of Munich are from the late 1960s and consist of snow bound streets and noisy Fasching parties with what I would today call music which is far too loud. It was definitely very different from the more sober surroundings of the Kempinski Munich Airport Hotel where I found myself last week for the IQPC Information Retention and eDiscovery Exchange conference.

The promise of three sunny and cold days did not materialise, indeed a number of us found ourselves fogbound in London and/or Munich and/or were diverted via Nuremberg.  Not that it mattered in the end as we were soon cosily ensconced in a comfortable hotel with a good programme of talks and interesting one to one meetings with General Counsel from a variety of the largest companies in the world. Continue reading →

The moral of the tale

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Did you know that India has over 600,000 lawyers? The profession in India is said to be the second largest in the world. No prizes for guessing that the US has the largest number of lawyers at a truly staggering 1,143,358 registered and active lawyers in 2007. I have been unable to find a more up to date figure presumably because there is some embarrassment about publishing the statistics.

Even the UK has 150,000 lawyers. I find it hard to believe that we in this country have so many. We have 25% of the number of lawyers in India, a country with a population which is 20 times larger than our own. The truly amazing figures continue. Whereas there are approximately 8-10,000 law graduates coming into the profession in England and Wales each year and about 30,000 in the US, the figure for India is over 60,000, every year!

No wonder there is a shortage of training contracts!

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Here comes the judge

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If you thought that it is only English judges who are telling our futures with their comments on the future of litigation and processes then you need to be aware that the pace of change in other jurisdictions continues apace.

In a recent article in Law Technology News, Mark Michels, Silicon Valley consultant and formerly litigation manager and discovery counsel at Cisco Systems, informs us that a number of judges have recently contributed to the debate about predictive coding, sometimes referred to as ‘technology assisted document review’. [Predictive Coding: Reading the Judicial Tea Leaves, Law Technology News, 17th October 2011]

US District Court Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck, Magistrate Judge John Facciola of the US District Court for the District of Columbia and Magistrate Judge Paul Grimm of the District of Maryland are three of the strongest proponents of e-discovery solutions currently sitting in the US courts.

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Is everything in the garden rosy?

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Not if your garden is in Greece! The latest news suggests that horticulture in that part of the Mediterranean must be very tricky. Drought conditions prevail and the plants are looking a trifle sickly.

It is not much better further along the Mediterranean either with Berlusconi withering on the vine, Zapatero running for cover (elections in Spain have been announced early for 20th November) and Portugal assumed to be every bit as badly off as the others.

And that is before we come to our own rather parched patch in the UK to say nothing of the swathes of desert in Ireland and the increasingly bare ground in France, Belgium and the USA.

One of the few verdant areas in the financial garden is Germany but the indigenous gardeners are not keen on lending out their watering cans and still less their extra produce to sustain less fortunate horticulturalists. Continue reading →

Out of juice

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Is there a conspiracy out there? I do not normally subscribe to such thoughts but on occasions I have to accept that there seems to be an unfortunate conjunction of events to say the least.

A few weeeks back, at a time when some 40 million users of BlackBerries around the world from Europe to Asia and North America were incensed not so much by the failure of service provided by Canada’s RIM (Research in Motion) but by their obstinate refusal to tell their customers what was going on, it was little comfort to be reminded by numerous emails (if you could receive them) of a Ronnie Corbett sketch on the BBC’s One Ronnie Show, which memorably starts with his complaint that “My Blackberry is not working.”

While that fiasco will not have done anything to boost the standing of RIM in the business world (I note that since service has been restored there has been no meaningful apology or explanation and no discussion of compensation), the lack of service meant that I was behind the ‘curve’ when it came to a sudden outpouring of judicial pronouncements on subjects as wide ranging as the future of the internet, the Human Rights Act and the European Court to feminism in the courts.

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Postcard from Boston

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Why are you here? What do you do? Who is Millnet? Are you going to set up in the US?

Before I went away I mentioned that I had had the honour to be invited to the Fall Conference of the Litigation Counsel of America. What a splendid occasion it was in the beautiful city of Boston.

As the old postcards used to have it (although I cannot actually mark the spot) if you look closely at the above photograph at about 2 o’clock from the top of the Arch in the centre of the picture you will get some idea of the view to be had over Boston Harbor from my hotel.

The interesting domed structure below, rather like a mini St Paul’s cathedral but without the current crop of protestors, is the Foster Pavilion on the waterfront and the venue for the welcome conference reception and traditional clambake.

I must confess it was an interesting experience being the sole Englishman among about 150 US trial and appellate attorneys, or litigators if you will. Once I had answered all the questions about why I was there and what I did, I was able to enjoy a fascinating couple of days seeing how US lawyers get their CPD points (or CLE accreditation as they prefer to call them).

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