Tag Archives: earles

Dines with dinosaurs

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On 12th March 1829 undergraduates at the University of Cambridge sent a challenge to their counterparts at Oxford and started a tradition which continues in more or less the same form to this day.

If you missed it last Saturday, imagine 16 heavy athletic men, plus a smaller man and a girl, afloat on the Thames in two boats so flimsy that the slightest mistake will result in thousands of pounds worth of boat having a large hole in the hull and everyone getting rather wetter than they had hoped or in the case of the winning crew’s cox, as wet as he knew he would become once the race was over.

The 157th Oxford v Cambridge Boat Race was rowed in near perfect conditions and Oxford’s impressive win means that they have now won 76 times to Cambridge’s 80 (one race was a dead heat). This is significant, because if you are an Oxford man, as I am, you have spent all your life seeing Cambridge’s once commanding lead in the overall statistics dwindle to almost parity. Dare I dream that in the not too distant future Oxford will overtake their rivals in the total number of wins? If so, I will have to make a real effort to attend a Dinosaurs’ Dinner again; for those unfamiliar with the Dinosaurs it has nothing to do with prehistoric times and everything to do with eating and drinking too much at my old college where the rowers’ dining club is called the Dinosaurs!

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A dance to the music of time

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Visiting museums and art galleries is an essential part of the experience of visiting new places. That is not to say that I do not from time to time visit museums in this country with which I am already familiar but the collections which tend to stand out in my mind are those which are housed in a building either especially made for the purpose of displaying the paintings, furniture and sculpture or are even in the artist’s own house or the house of a major collector. I visit these more often in a town or city in a foreign country because while visiting foreign parts it is likely that there is more time available “to stand and stare”.

The Sorolla Museum in Madrid and the Jacquemart-Andre Museum in Paris, “the passion of Edouard Andre and Nelie Jacquemart,”  are collections housed in the artist’s and the collectors’ houses respectively, whereas the magnificent Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid is in a refurbished palace designed to show off the fabulous collection of pictures collected by the late Baron Thyssen which he gave to the Spanish nation in honour of his Spanish wife Carmen.

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The name and shame blame game

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What a few months it has been!

I am not talking about erupting volcanoes and disrupted airline schedules, the General Election (although I see from Twitter that “Doing a Rochdale” is likely to rank highly in the litany of public gaffes alongside President Ford’s “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe” and Gerald Ratner’s less than flattering description of his jewellery), the Greek economic crisis (now extended to Portugal and Spain, where next?) or the debacle over swine flu, the “pandemic” which never was (the use of the word was unnecessary and silly, designed to cause fear and anxiety).

For once, I mean something more prosaic and mainstream, although as someone with an interest in e-disclosure, I have to admit that I have found it quite exciting!

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Of mice and men

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Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb were two bad mice. Beatrix Potter conceived the story of how they both created mayhem in the dolls’ house belonging to Lucinda and Jane, while the dolls were out in their pram. When the little girl who owns the dolls’ house discovers the mess, she gets a doll dressed up as a policeman while her more practical nanny sets a mouse trap. The two bad mice have to atone for their naughtiness.

Now we have a report in The Lawyer [Russian Retribution, 31 March, 2010] that two of Russia’s wealthiest men are to face one another in Court in 2011 after lawyers acting for Roman Abramovich failed to persuade Mr Justice Colman to strike out claims by Boris Berezovsky that Abramovich used coercive tactics against his former business partner which Berezovsky alleges caused him billions of pounds in losses.

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The cat’s out of the bag

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The judgment in Gavin Goodale & Others v The Ministry of Justice & Others was delivered by the Senior Master, Master Whitaker, in November last year and is now available on BAILII [http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2009/B41.html]

Master Whitaker is well known as an advocate of proportionate e-disclosure in appropriate cases and also as a judge experienced in dealing with Group Litigation orders as in this case involving the Opiate Dependent Prisoners Litigation.

What makes this judgment of particular interest to those involved in the whole area of electronic disclosure is the fact that the Master saw fit to include in his judgement the ESI questionnaire which the Rule Committee decided recently to refer to another subcommittee.

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David and Goliath

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A recent US case of a law firm suing a client contains a salutary lesson. 

Debevoise & Plimpton had sued former client Candlewood for $6million in unpaid legal fees and found itself facing “an answer and counterclaim” seeking damages of $55million! [Ex-Debevoise Client Raises Nasty Counterclaims in Unpaid Bills Case, The American Lawyer, 14 January, 2010]

Apparently, some of Candlewood’s allegations against their former advisers were not too flattering which only goes to show that the publicity generated by this type of dispute is often publicity the law firm could well do without.

According to Candlewood’s counterclaim, D&P managed to bill for more than 15,000 hours or the equivalent of 10 lawyers working full time for the 10 month period in question, whereas Candlewood’s Delaware based lawyers successfully represented the company for two and a half years at a total cost of $450,000.

Could this happen in England?

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It’s the strategy, stupid!

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Let me remind you of the hoary old statistic often trotted out, namely that some 90% of corporate documentation is now created electronically rather than on paper, and over 90% of that is NEVER turned into paper.

Whether the statistics are accurate or not, there can be no doubt that vast amounts of information are now held in electronic form. This leads to questions about the way companies deal with the storage of such information and what arrangements they have for its retrieval when faced with litigation, a regulatory investigation, an arbitration or a Freedom of Information application.

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Sic transit gloria mundi

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Latin phrases used to be an important part of a lawyer’s armoury, if only to confuse those without a classical education into believing that a mundane set of words must be important because of the solemnity with which they were intoned. Doubtless this also justified instructing a lawyer and a fee as the ordinary person could not be expected to act for himself (and in those days it almost invariably was a male) if they could not understand the language used.

I have an affectionate memory of learning Latin although too often my reports complained that “he could do better at Latin sentences if he learned the vocabulary and the conjugations”. I am in favour of it being taught, not least because it is one of the foundations of our own language today. However, nowadays the use of Latin in the law is dying out and a good thing too! Plain English is what we need so that everyone can understand what is being said and written.

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Confucius, he say…

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“May you live in interesting times” is reputedly the English version or paraphrase of an ancient Chinese curse.

Whatever its origin, the saying crops up in a variety of differing situations including a speech by Robert F Kennedy in 1966, a letter from Austen Chamberlain to a member of the US House of Representatives and more recently in a speech by Bob Garvin, the character played by Donald Sutherland in the 1994 film, Disclosure.

The film starred Demi Moore and Michael Douglas who, contrary to what you might expect from the title, were not engaged in a Hollywood version of Part 31 but played a couple who worked in a technology company and who became engrossed in a sexual harassment case!!

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