Or do they? Does it actually matter?

The official answer is that what we in England used to know as a billion has been downgraded. Is this just another example of Governments massaging statistics? I suppose it matters if you are trying to make something look bigger than it actually is. If I am a billionaire, I want to be worth a million million. But I am not, so do I care that I am these days only worth a thousand million?

Likewise with a trillion which has undergone an even more extensive cut. What used to be a million, million, million million is now only a million, million.

We are obsessed these days with the “how many?” question. How many friends have you got on Facebook? How many followers on Twitter? How many connections on LinkedIn?

This all reminds me of the schoolboy jape which begins with the question, “How many monkeys in a hammerfor?”  If you are smart, you soon learn not to ask, “What’s a hammerfor?” as it invites the response, “to hit you on the head with!” accompanied by a hammer-like fist being brought down upon your head to illustrate the point.

Never fear, though, when it comes to litigation support, because help is at hand.

As a result of LinkedIn and Twitter (almost inevitably these days) I have been made aware by Chris Dale of a set of statistics useful to anyone who has to advise a client about the cost of e-disclosure.

Those of you familiar with this blog will know that I deprecate the fact that we in England and Wales have to use the phrase e-disclosure these days when everyone else in the common law world uses the description e-discovery, as we used to do before 1999.

So, I am always pleased to include a reference to an article which talks about e-discovery because all then seems right with the world and after all no one has yet explained to me satisfactorily or at all what the difference is between the two.

John Tredinnick, litigation partner at Mountain West and DC law firm Holland & Hart and founder of e-discovery search blog Catalyst, explains simply what may be involved when litigation support people talk about gigabytes of data. It is not, of course, an exact science because, for obvious reasons, the answer depends on the type of document and its size. 

The short article is well worth a read  [“Shedding light on an E-Discovery mystery: how many documents in a Gigabyte?” John Tredinnick, Catalyst blog, 7th July, 2011] and, for the record, the median answer is around 2,300, considerably fewer than the often cited “industry standard” of 10,000.

Now, how many tweets have I received today? That is the serious stuff!!

Photo credit:  Male proboscis monkey, Singapore Zoo by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen (creative commons licence)

Occasionally the law comes up against someone who is perceived by some to be a particularly persistent “offender”. That person writes a series of articles, the subject of which then seeks to prevent disclosure of the material. The matter comes to court and then the unexpected (or should I say unintended?) happens. The trial does not go as expected and the whole point of the court case is lost. The person who attempted to prevent disclosure has a considerable amount of egg on his/her face and the information they wished to keep secret is more widely disseminated than they could ever have feared.

Does this sound familiar? If so, you are probably thinking footballers playing away, super injunctions and tabloids screaming with names, pictures and luridly illustrated stories.

In earlier centuries, satirists and radicals regularly lampooned the Establishment, whether the Royal Family, the landowners or merely those perceived to be in power. Sometimes, the authorities reacted swiftly, even vindictively and at other times they were more relaxed. Anyone who is familiar with the extraordinary Hogarth cartoons of the period will be thankful that they were not banned and/or destroyed.

In 1817, satirist William Hone faced three separate trials (on consecutive days) for publishing pamphlets ridiculing the habits of the people in power and was conspicuously successful in distributing the pamphlets widely round the country at a time when communications were considerably more difficult and less instantaneous than today. What was published in London one day was read in Liverpool or Manchester the next.

The authorities were furious, alleging that the articles were harmful to public morals and even that they tended to bring religion into contempt. The real motives of the prosecutions were political because of the way they portrayed the behaviour of those in authority. Although the judges were said to be biased against Hone, the jury on each of the three occasions found him not guilty amid huge public celebrations amongst the crowd which had gathered outside the Guildhall during the trials. There was even a public collection for him!

Eat your hearts out Trafigura, Ryan Giggs and Andrew Marr!

I was reminded of this story by the BBC’s Jonathan Freedland who opened a new series of “The Long View” earlier this week with a look at the world of super injunctions, so thank you to the BBC for piquing my curiosity once more on this by now well worn subject.

You would be mistaken therefore if you thought that the problems caused by Twitter and the like were a new phenomenon and a product of the 21st century.

There is nothing new under the sun, even down to the terminology.  Following his acquittal, Hone published a song illustrated by his friend and collaborator George Cruikshank. The hand-coloured frontispiece represents a farmyard with the different characters engaged in the trial as domestic birds, notably Lord Ellenborough, Edmund Law, the Lord Chief Justice as a turkey and William Hone as a teasing and twittering tom-tit:

Great Gobble Gobble Gobble, and Twit Twittle Twit, or Law, Versus Common Sense, Being a twitting Report of successive Attacks on a Tom Tit, his stout Defences & final Victory. A New Song, With Original Music By Lay Logic, Esq’re, Student in the Law of Libel.

Law versus Common Sense indeed! The eponymous Lord Chief Justice directed the jury to find a verdict of guilty, and their acquittal of Hone is generally said to have hastened his death, a year later in December 1818.

So, Twitter is nothing new and indeed was alive and well in the 19th century!

What is certain in all this today is that the law and the authorities are as little able to keep up with technological developments as they were in the 19th century. No amount of televising of the proceedings of the Supreme Court provided by Sky, of all companies, nor interventions by ministers warning people not to breach injunctions by using Twitter (after MPs have taken advantage of Parliamentary privilege to name the subject of an injunction whose very existence the authorities have decreed we should not know about) will make it any better.

What seems to be reasonably clear is that in history as well as in the law and, dare I say it, in the realms of technology, there is little new under the sun. Of course there are new developments and new incidents and experiences but what is really new is the way we all react to them.

I have no influence on how our politicians and others in authority may come to deal with an insistent public which is determined to “know” about the matters which others would prefer they did not. I have, however, a small influence on how lawyers may react to changes in technology in the area of disclosure. In a small way, I believe that I and others like me are winning the battle to persuade lawyers to overcome their innate fear of new technology and to harness it to ensure a more cost effective and proportionate result for their clients.

After all, you have to take the Long View. It’s the Law and Commonsense!

::

Listen to The Long View in BBC iPlayer

Photo credit: Cruikshank’s cover illustration for the sheet music of “Great Gobble Gobble… ” from the Princeton University Library collection.

Imagine you have just thrown yourself off a bridge. You are plummeting ever nearer and nearer to the ground and then, in a split second, the free falling feeling turns into a stomach churning rebound up into the stratosphere, or so it feels. This is because you have a piece of stretchy cord tightly strapped around your ankles.

Yes, I’m talking about bungee jumping. For some, including myself, the idea sounds exhilarating. The feeling of free falling is undeniably unbeatable, giving you the chance to let go of everything… and fly.

Why would anyone not? Well I have to admit, I remember standing at the top of the ragged gorge and, as I looked down, I began to think of the risks involved. What happens if they didn’t calculate my weight correctly or what if the bungee snaps…? I could end up with a serious headache.

I guess you could look at blogging in a similar way. Why, as a lawyer or barrister, throw yourself headfirst into the ragged gorge that is the internet?

I am aware of the growing attention that has been paid to blogging lawyers and barristers. So, what better than to write a blog on blogging! As social media platforms have seeped into our everyday lives – Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube and Twitter for example – it has never been so easy to share opinions and advice with colleagues and the world at large.

Emma Barnett, in a recent article in The Sunday Telegraph, has pointed out that the days of one-way communication are over in corporate life, yet another article in the same paper reports that over 60 of the FTSE 100 companies have not yet taken advantage of social media. No doubt it is a similar situation in the legal world.

According to Hugo Parcell of Relationship Audits and Management, speaking on ‘The Use of Social Networking Sites for Business’, the advantages of legal blogging are:

1. Blogging allows law firms to engage with clients and the public on a personal level.
2. Blogs allow the sharing of valuable content.
3. Bloggers increase the profile of their firms in the marketplace.
4. Bloggers create networking opportunities and make a name for themselves. This gives them an advantage to someone who may rely just on LinkedIn, for instance.

In much the same vein Ben Whewey, writing in Legal Week a while back, asked if blogging can help your legal career, [Blogging - can it help your legal career? Legal Week, 21st Feb 2011] and the conclusion (based on the balance of comments posted) is a qualified yes.

This was borne out when I found myself in the company of a group of young litigation lawyers recently; the general view was that they were thoroughly enjoying the firm’s encouragement and the support provided when it came to blogging. The entire group had given it a go and plan to carry on doing so in the future.

Chris Dale in his blog [Blogging, Friending and Tweeting: what lawyers should and should not do, 1st April, 2011] also expresses support for the idea that law firms should be encouraging juniors and associates to blog.

We should probably give the young ones scope, to some extent, to fly with new ideas; the etiquette of everyday discourse is worth clinging on to; the basic tenets of old journalism and established marketing principles are important, but one must be flexible as new methods of publication come along. A lot of it comes down to common sense.

He cites a debate on Twitter questioning whether a junior or associate could be trusted to blog – the view was that you would not have such junior people flying the firm’s flag at a cocktail party, so why would you let them publish things in the firm’s name?  Chris Dale suggests that you have the wrong associates if you would not trust them at a party…

The debate ended with the sensible question “Why are we applying old rules to a new environment?” My view is that riding the juniors’ interest in new techniques is something which benefits the company or firm as well as the individual – provided that the rules and parameters are clearly defined.

This leads me finally to a very topical question; is blogging a trusted form of communication? And…

1. Who is going to take your blog seriously?
2. Who is going to read your blog?
3. To what extent are “serious clients” going to pay attention what their lawyers blog about?
4. What are the risks?
5. Is the bungee cord strong enough to hold you?

It may be stretching the point but I have reached the conclusion that blogging should be enjoyed and encouraged by the law firms as a positive aspect to a lawyer or barrister’s career and life. It is an up and coming and liberating method of communication.

The bungee cord question is a matter of best practice and proper safeguards. This is a topic which I look forward to discussing in my next blog.

Photo credit: Bungee jumping at night by Bill Morrow under Creative Commons  Attribution 2.0 Generic Licence

If you are a fan of Tom Cruise, or possibly Samantha Morton, you will remember the 2002 film, Minority Report, where, in the future, criminals are caught before they can commit their crimes. One of the officers in the special crime unit is accused of a crime and sets out to prove his innocence.

What nonsense, you may think but I never said I was going to write something serious all the time!

But how about this?

There are approximately 61.8 million people in the UK. The Government hopes that we will know the exact figure after this month’s census, about which I have said quite enough already  [see The face that launched a thousand quips 8th Feb, 2011] but although they plan to spend £500 million of our money on the project I very much doubt that they will get the right answers.

But no, I am being serious. I am in a minority. According to recent press reports, more than 30 million Facebook accounts have been set up in the UK. Joanna Shields is the boss of Facebook UK and she says that London uses Facebook more than any other city in Britain. What is truly astonishing is that Facebook users spend an average of two and a half hours on the site EVERY DAY compared to only two hours watching the telly. Worse still, 24.46% of the British public spend between three and four hours a day on the site.

I was about to get all pompous about this until my colleague Naj Bueno pointed out that in setting up the Millnet Facebook page she had set one up for for me too! Phew! That’s alright then! Not in a minority after all. You will have gathered, however, that as I did not know I had a page until reminded, I naturally bring down the averages as I spend no time on Facebook, although perhaps I should start using it as I am told that there are two smart tagged photos of me posted by others. Perhaps you can have a look and tell me what they are like! My mentor has promised to show me but as yet I still await her tutorial.

In actual fact, I am not against this sort of thing. In fact I am rather a fan as long as it does not get out of hand. A site where people can exchange information and make plans, or look at each others’ photos, is harmless enough. The internet makes this all so easy. Where I become nervous is about the amount of information people are happy for others to see and the nature of that information on occasions. I remember my children pleading with me NOT to open an account, presumably because they would be embarrassed about what I posted on the page. They need not fear. I do not propose to go down that route (at least for the time being).

Mind you, they are pretty horrified that I blog and even more so that I tweet but that is another matter altogether.!

There has been a debate about blogging in the pages of Legal Week recently. I have to confess I thought that was rather a silly question until I read the blog article by Ben Wheway [Blogging - can it help your legal career? Legal Week, 21st Feb, 2011 and reproduced in print on p15 of Legal Week, 3rd March 2011].  Ben accepts that blogging remains something of an alien concept to many lawyers but argues that it can be a professional opportunity for “up-and-coming lawyers.”

As a blogger, I can see the good side of the activity as well as the frustrations so am pleased to repeat the positives identified by Mr Wheway:

• If well put together, it can help you stand out from the crowd;
• It can make you a better lawyer by forcing you to keep on top of your subject;
• It assists in the art of presenting arguments concisely;
• It distinguishes itself from bland and naked marketing by adding a touch of realism and personal experience;
• Gives a spin to the mundane material from which it derives and may get you noticed by people outside the normal readership of pure client targeted marketing bumf.

Perhaps we bloggers will not be in a minority for long after all. I am happy to admit that I enjoy it more than I would Facebook, although I have to confess to spending a fair bit of time on LinkedIn recently..

Matt’s cartoons for The Daily Telegraph have for a long time been favourites of mine so I was particularly amused to see this apposite offering a few days ago as I settled into my seat on the BA flight to New York where I was to attend Legal Tech 2011. As a Legal Tech virgin I was determined to make the most of what is probably the pre-eminent gathering of the Legal Technology industry each year. And I did!

Many other commentators regularly write up the proceedings at Legal Tech and I do not propose to compete with them not least because the musings of a virgin may be of little interest to those more enured to the process. Suffice to say that it was well worth braving the 15 inches of snow sparkling on the streets and in Central Park as well as the biting wind and enjoying the lovely clear sunny skies to meet up with a lot of people whose names I knew and to whom I can at last put a face.

My colleagues Emma Kettleton, Narjara Bueno and I were able to spend time with clients and US law firms outside the conference so our days (and sometimes nights) were pretty full but I managed to visit one of my favourite museums, the Frick Collection, and to visit Ground Zero which, despite myself, I found to be an emotional experience.

It is invidious to mention names at these events as one sees so many people and attends so many events and is entertained by so many kind people that I would hate to leave anyone out. In any event I am getting round to speaking to all those I need to thank on a personal basis.

But I need to mention the people at Index Engines because I am very excited by the technology which enables us to index the contents of back up tapes (rather than restore them) at a cost and over a time which compares very favourably to the old practice of restoration. Meeting those responsible for this remarkable technology was a thrill to a jaded lawyer because using their technology marks a real advance in the process of finding relevant material to use in litigation at a cost which is much more likely to be proportionate than restoration used to be. Anyone wanting to know more should contact me or one of my colleagues as we are actively promoting this product in the market and achieving success with it. It is fair to say that we have not yet encountered anything but praise for this extraordinary advance in unearthing ESI and making it available in short order and at a reasonable cost.

Coming back to the UK from the US is always something of a culture shock so you can imagine my surprise when I learned that the Supreme Court had “approved the use of Twitter in court hearings” as one headline had it. I thought that was odd and could not imagine counsel tweeting to their Lordships or what advantages that would bring.

Of course, once I had read around the subject a bit I realised that what the Court had done was to permit journalists, lawyers and members of the public to tweet about what was going on in court. Bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted, I thought, but not wishing to be churlish I have to concede that, as long as there are safeguards in place in sensitive cases, it is good to see our highest court keeping up with the advances in technology which now rules our lives in so many ways.

This reminds me that the courts are coming to terms with the explosion in the use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter and decisions are starting to emerge (such as Macmillan v Hummingbird Speedway Inc, about which I have written before).

The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) is also getting in on the act. This after a number of highly publicised “mistakes” by the Twitterati in recent weeks. For example, do you remember the ex Liverpool player who tweeted his rant after Manchester United defeated Liverpool last month and sought to make a point by posting a picture of the referee wearing a United shirt. His attitude (“And they call him one of the best referees? That’s a joke. SMH (shaking my head))” cost him a fine of £10,000. More recently a fashion designer tweeted about the riots in Cairo that “rumour is they heard that our spring collection is now available online…” The tweet drew extensive criticism over the Net and he apologised.

Then the PCC ruled that tweets are public property. You could see this in The Times of Feb 9th if you are not prevented by their paywall. For those of you who are shut out of the paper, the PCC ruled that tweets published by a civil servant at the Department of Transport called Sarah Baskerville (or Baskers as she likes to be known) were public property despite the fact that Baskers posted a disclaimer that her tweets were not offered in an official capacity. She had twittered about government policies as spin and had complained about red wine induced headaches at work but had overlooked the fact that tweets can be searched and seen by anyone interested unless certain privacy measures are adopted. She argued for a reasonable expectation of privacy and that reporting of her tweets was misleading but the PCC decided that republication of the material by national newspapers did not amount to an invasion of her privacy despite that fact that they had originally been intended for a smaller audience.

Here we have yet another example of officialdom deciding that people posting material on social media sites forego their right to privacy in most cases. How long before we have an English court decision on the subject? At least now we will all know about it when it happens, or more probably as it happens via Twitter from the Supreme Court!

I tell you, John Wayne never had to put up with this. Nor did he have to deal with the worry that Red Indians had hacked into his email account or posted a dodgy picture of him and tagged it on Facebook. Today, he would never keep it under his hat!

I wonder how many people know what the following are: WeeWorld, Taringa! Habbo, Elftown, Qzone, RenRen, Plurk, Bandoo or Viadeo. To hazard a guess, not too many!

But if I asked about LinkedIn, MySpace, Bebo or Facebook, most people would know that they are social networking sites. LinkedIn has over 75 million registered users, Bebo 117m+, MySpace in excess of 130m and Facebook a whopping 500 million and counting.

By contrast the others are relatively small apart from the sites popular in China where RenRen has 15 million registered users and Qzone a highly respectable 200 million plus! [Source: Wikipedia, List of Social Networking Websites]

Last week I attended a small seminar at Speechly Bircham run by a company called Educated Change and 2 of their consultants, Peter Klein and Kevin Bryant.

The seminar dealt with issues around the use of networking sites as they affect lawyers and those in sales. It was an entertaining hour or more which encouraged me to think more carefully about how to use networking sites to better advantage.

For instance, the speakers cited solicitor Chris Sherliker, who says he gets a lot of work by using Twitter. He has an impressive 11000 plus followers so there is a ready market out there hanging on his every word. Occasionally someone will have a legal problem and Chris may well get the call.

Peter Klein also said he used a LinkedIn service which enables him to find other people registered on LinkedIn with interests similar to his own merely by looking at his mobile phone which will pick up other members in a room such as the one we were in. Sadly, we were all too well behaved to have our phones on and he was unable to connect with anyone but it is certainly thought provoking.

DLA Piper was identified as the most active user of Twitter of the large law firms but by and large the numbers of followers of any firm were disappointingly small reaching only into the low thousands (compared with Facebook’s 500 million users).

I feel there is something worth looking at here. In simple terms, we have to get used to the idea that the days when it was sufficient for law firms to pump out material they wanted their clients to read, ie broadcasting solutions, are well and truly over and the new generation(s), particularly those now aged over 25 and up to about 55, are hooked on social networking which is essentially interactive.

Hummingbirds are among the smallest birds in the world. Most people know that not only can they hover but they can also fly backwards. They come in a variety of bright colours from mainly warm countries and drink nectar while eating insects and spiders.

One of my interests is the continent of South America which I have been fortunate to visit on a number of occasions. I was thrilled to discover that not only was the hummingbird used as a talisman by the Aztecs but that the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli was often depicted as a hummingbird. When I swallowed my nerves (and my breakfast, which fortunately stayed swallowed) and flew in a tiny plane over the arid sands of the Nazca desert in Peru to see for myself what I had only read or heard Maria Reiche lecture about, the famous Nazca Lines, I was fascinated to see that one of the shapes depicted is a hummingbird! The bird is also in the coat of arms of Trinidad and Tobago.

I promised you a nugget and if you have read this far you have earned one.

The same day as my seminar on social networking sites I was alerted by the Electronic Discovery Group (EDG) on LinkedIn of a case in the USA which linked social networking, hummingbirds and electronic disclosure/discovery. What a coincidence!  If you are yet not ‘in’ on LinkedIn, you can refer to an article on the excellent K&L Gates Electronic Discovery Law site:  Court Orders Production of Plaintiff’s User Names and Passwords for Social Network Accounts, 21st October 2010.

Let me explain. In McMillen v Hummingbird Speedway Inc, (PICS No 10-3174 Jefferson Co Sept 9th 2010) President Judge Foradora held that where a person’s social networking sites contain information relevant to the issues in a claim or defence in litigation, access to those sites should be freely granted.

The link to the K&L Gates report above gives a lot more detail, but briefly the Plaintiff (they still use the proper word in Pennsylvania) in a road traffic accident (shunt) argued that the details of his password and log in to Facebook and MySpace were private and should not be disclosed despite the defendant’s request. The Judge said that there was no evidence supporting this contention and furthermore that there was no argument that the contents of the sites were privileged. Indeed, the judge went on to say that merely by using the sites the user was expressly accepting that there was no confidentiality and that users expressly contemplated that the sites were open to others to see. As the information might prove to be pertinent to the truth or falsity of the claim by the Plaintiff and his alleged injuries, the Plaintiff should disclose his Facebook and MySpace passwords and log ins within 15 days and should not alter or delete any of the information contained on the relevant sites.

I promised you a nugget and there you have it! Pause for thought and consider how many cases you have where you ought to be considering telling your clients as part of their disclosure obligations that they should not be altering or deleting material on their social networking sites and should be prepared to disclose their user names and log ins to the other side!

Time will tell whether the courts in this jurisdiction will take the same view but you have to ask why, if asked, they would not make a similar order for disclosure.

Even that did not really capture the menace behind the image until one realised that the blemishes grouped together in the left hand corner of the back of the chair were in fact the marks made by the bullets fired by his executioners into the chest and heart of convicted killer Ronnie Lee Gardner.

Whatever your views about capital punishment I was left with the overwhelming sense that this was not what I wanted to see published in my newspaper. After all, in the days when we had capital punishment here we were not treated to interviews with the hangman or grisly pictures of the swinging noose ( or at least not since the days of public executions).

Too much information, you might think! But then I came across the extraordinary news that the Utah State Attorney General had tweeted the news that Gardner’s pleas had been rejected shortly before the execution took place. He tweeted: “I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner’s execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied  his victims”.

The fact that the Attorney-General announced to the world that he had allowed the execution to proceed is not, in itself, remarkable. There was a significant public interest in the event and if he had made the announcement in a letter or on TV I doubt if there would have been any controversy. However, the fact that he used the medium of Twitter has caused a storm with commentators arguing that the use of this medium to disseminate this kind of information is inappropriate and others arguing that it is all a matter of getting the information into the public domain and the means used were quick and efficient.

I mentioned late last year that the first injunction was served in this country using Twitter and that the Twitterati had been at least in part responsible for the lifting of that horrible animal the super injunction in the case of the Ivory Coast toxic waste dumping. [See:  The Last Straw 6th October, 2009 and King Charles I and the Twitterati 27th October, 2009]

Tweeting injunctions and disseminating information about them seems to me to be in a different category altogether from State officials tweeting information about life and death. Efficient as it may be I cannot help but feel that this type of communication should not be used for subject matter as potentially explosive as reprieves ( or not) on Death Row.

But if anyone thought that Twitter did not concern them they should be quickly disabused of the idea. In a recent case of Sexting (yes, it really exists) in California, (where else?) a Sergeant Quon appeared to be sending an inordinate number of texts on his departmental pager. Department officials discovered he was sending an average of 28 texts per shift but that only three were work related. The personal messages were largely to his wife and mistress both of whom happened to work for the local police department. Quon sued the police department for violating his privacy after they sought to recover from him the cost of the personal texts. But in a unanimous judgement, the Supreme Court held that government officials were entitled to review emails and texts on work owned mobile phones and computers as long as there is a legitimate work related purpose!

It is a strange old world out there and woe betide anyone who thinks that Twitter is not something they need to be concerned with. After all the next client who rings you (assuming they use anything as old fashioned as a telephone) may be wanting advice about a text they sent at an unfortunate moment to someone they would rather not have involved from a place they did not want their nearest and dearest to find out about.

You may not like it as a medium but you need to be aware of it and its capacity to surprise!

What is life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

Most of us rarely have time to look at the great buildings which surround our places of work or rest. W. H. Davies thought that life was not worth having if you could not enjoy a good gawp in a leisurely fashion.

Recently, I have had an opportunity to look rather more closely at some of the buildings in the City of London and in Norwich, which was, from the 11th century until it was overtaken by the expansion of Bristol largely as a result of the slave trade, the second most important city in England.

To give you a taste of what I mean, I noted that:

• The Royal Exchange was founded by Sir Thomas Gresham in 1565 as a centre of commerce in the City
• Jonathan Miles founded a coffee house in the City around 1680, the site of which is famous as the site of the original London Stock Exchange founded in 1801
• The Lloyd’s market began in Edward Lloyd’s coffee house in Tower Street in 1688 and the Society of Lloyd’s moved to the Royal Exchange in 1774
• The Normans constructed Norwich Castle in the 1070s
• Norwich Cathedral was started by Herbert de Losinga in 1096
• Thomas Bignold set up the first Norwich Union Society in 1797 to help himself insure against attacks by highwaymen and quickly realised there was a need for an insurance scheme to protect the citizenry in the event of fire, prevalent in a city largely built of wood.

What fascinates me about these institutions is their longevity. A Cathedral started over 900 years ago is still in use today, indeed I was at a service there last week. The Castle is certainly still there dominating the area around as it must have done in Norman times and Norwich Union may be called Aviva but it is still very much in business as its recent results show.

Similarly, the Royal Exchange standing at the confluence of Threadneedle Steet and Cornhill just opposite the Bank of England (founded in 1694), is now a thriving centre of commerce as it was intended to be almost 450 years ago.

What about the coffee houses? I have always thought that it is the most extraordinary development that places where men came together to drink coffee and talk should have grown into global institutions such as Lloyd’s and the Stock Exchange.

Where do we go from here? Where are the coffee houses of 2010 and into what will they be transformed?

Personally I do not see the site of the first Starbucks or Café Nero becoming the first inter-galactic communications centre, but have to acknowledge the growing power of social networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and new(ish) media such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Del.icio.us

After all, how could you not accept that this media is increasingly important in our lives when the news is dominated by them? John Terry certainly discovered the power of the social networking sites when his super injunction was undermined by the information already in the public domain as a result of such sites.

David Milliband is reported to have written lovingly about Michael Jackson and his brother Ed extolled the virtues of a porn site for better sex. Both denied they had posted the information and that they were victims of a scam and, of course, we believe them. Likewise Harriet Harman’s “bogus” message to the Shadow Prisons Minister, Alan Duncan.

As an organisation which regards itself as operating at the leading edge of e-discovery in this country and globally, Millnet is taking Twitter and the like more seriously. When we started tweeting, we immediately received a Tweet congratulating us on joining the 21st Century!

My point is that, while it may be difficult to see where the likes of Facebook or Twitter are going, there is no denying the power of the medium. This means that lawyers and anyone else wanting to operate successfully in a given area must get to grips with modern ways of communication. The quill pen is dead, long live the keyboard!

A recent headline in the Sunday papers [Cyber spoofs launch digital election war, Sunday Times, 28 Feb 2010] suggests that the upcoming General Election is to be fought in the social media. I don’t know but what is clear is that individuals now have huge power at their fingertips to influence and contribute to debates on all levels and it is difficult to see how this can be avoided. Meeting places are still required and while coffee may not be on sale and the meeting places are in cyberspace or the blogosphere, those keen to build relationships and businesses still need a forum in which to meet and discuss business but which is entirely different to what it was only a few years ago.

It must be worth while to “stand and stare” occasionally, particularly if that moment of thought provides the impetus to build a new relationship which ultimately will assist in improving the way a business problem is resolved.

We can help with that too. Come and talk to us about your e-discovery problems. The coffees are on us!

Frustrated by Parliament’s refusal to grant him money and irritated in particular by the speeches of the members, the King tried to arrest John Pym, Sir Arthur Hazelrigg, William Strode, John Hampden and Denzil Holles in the Commons Chamber, an event which helped to trigger the start of the Civil War in 1642. News of the King’s intentions had filtered through to the five who had long since fled the Chamber by the time the King arrived.

No monarch has entered the Chamber since and, as we all know, the King lost his throne and his head in 1649!

In recent weeks we have seen numbers of headlines and articles on the subject of a so called super injunction. In case you missed it, the case involved a secret report on how a Dutch oil trading company called Trafigura dumped toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. The report had been commissioned after the incident and found that the dumping would have been illegal under European law. The company went to Court in England to try and stop its publication after a leaked copy of the report found its way to the Guardian newspaper.

Now I have not seen the report nor the terms of the injunction but it was reported that, as well as wanting to prevent the publication of the report, the company also wanted to prevent the fact that a Labour MP had tabled a question in the Commons relating to the Trafigura affair from becoming public.

The company succeeded initially. In effect, it obtained an injunction which prevented anyone from reporting the fact that the injunction had been sought and obtained, from reporting the fact that a question had been placed on the Commons order paper, AND from reporting that those two things had happened! Presumably, in this Kafkaesque fashion, it also prevented anyone thinking about reporting the two facts from doing so! Thinking about them or reporting them I mean!

Fortunately, the Twitterati saved the day! Users of Twitter, presumably in fewer than 140 characters, managed to tell the world about the existence of the question on the Commons order paper and about a website where the report could be read.

Once that happened, the injunction was lifted.

This was a significant victory for the users of Twitter in the same month that the court allowed the first injunction to be served by Twitter (see The Last Straw, 6th October). I would go further and say it was a significant victory against the so called super injunction and the ever-present trend towards unwarranted secrecy in our national life.

Given the current furore about MPs’expenses, I must say here that MPs and Parliament have a lot of fence mending to do but, nonetheless, the tweeters have achieved a welcome affirmation of the principle that Parliament must be allowed to go about its business without fear or hindrance from anyone, be they ever so mighty.

Was this not what the Civil War was all about?

Now, suddenly, there is a new problem!!

On 1st October 2009, the High Court jumped into the “Tweetosphere” (is there such a word, after Blogosphere?) by agreeing to allow a claimant to serve an injunction via Twitter.

Mr Justice Lewison agreed with Matthew Richardson instructed by Griffin Law that Twitter was the best way to reach the person behind www.twitter.com/blaneysblarney whose anonymous writer was said to be impersonating Donal Blaney. Richardson said that the ruling had widespread implications for identity theft on the internet. A spokesman from Strathclyde University called it a landmark decision.

Although the details are not clear (and at first there was some suggestion that the court had authorised the issue of a writ(sic)/injunction via Twitter) it seems that the court authorised the injunction to be served via Twitter and because of the 140 character limit on Tweets there was a link to a webpage where the full content of the court order was set out.

All this, on the same day that the eleven new Supreme Court Justices were sworn in before enjoying the Lord Chancellor’s Breakfast which traditionally starts the legal year. Readers will be delighted to remember that the Lord Chancellor has not yet been abolished despite the best efforts of Tony Blair and Lord Falconer and despite the fact that the present if not final incumbent is plain Mr Straw.

Last Straw or not, this development is certainly a first and coming, as it did, on the very day that the Supreme Court opened for business, it is an early and powerful endorsement of the way the law, so often called an ass, can be at the cutting edge of technology.

The decision establishes the principle that anonymity on the internet is not to be used as a cloak to hide the identity of people who break the law.

Who said lawyers did not need to understand the basics of technology? Whoever it was, don’t you believe it!!