How much do we mind? Not a lot, it seems,

Not long after posting More on 42 days last week, I read The Economist’s take on the erosion of civil liberties in Britain, Mary Poppins and Magna Carta

Liberals have long lamented that, despite much stirring rhetoric about the mother of parliaments and Magna Carta, modern Britons have little real interest in their hard-won liberties. On June 17th, as Gordon Brown gave a speech on the subject, that pessimism seemed confirmed when one rapt listener fell asleep in the middle of the prime minister’s oration.

Much worse, however, was Gordon Brown’s argument “that new state powers were guarantors of liberty, not threats to it.” This was the position taken by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Saddam and most recently Mugabe. Gordon must be pleased he is such good company.

“Search engine results can get facts wrong” (STBO)

I am not sure whether to be appalled or amused by one of last week’s front page stories in the Gazette, Net-surfing lawyers warned of compliance risk (not yet archived by the Gazette). Apparently, according to a leading QC solicitor, Andrew Hopper,

Solicitors risk breaching conduct rules and could face insurance claims if they use non-specialist online sources for legal research.

You don’t say! Are there any lawyers who are not aware that user-generated content is not always reliable. The story is a non-story (and perhaps more the result of yet another vanity publishing update than anything better).

Meanwhile, the article goes on, Emma Harris, Law Society librarian, told the Gazette: ‘Today’s trainees, despite the best efforts of law school librarians, don’t know the world outside the internet. . . ” Has no one told her that for better or worse (and in my view very much the former), the internet is not only how information is now delivered, whether it is the daily update, or the RSS feed, but the internet has also greatly expanded our access to information. What we should be doing is ensuring that lawyers understand how best to use the internet.

And STBO? ~ “Stating the bleeding obvious”

“I’m sorry, would you say that again?”

A further thought on the impact of the BlackBerry, this time (and thanks again to a link in one of Nicholas Carr’s posts in Rough Type) from Christine Rosen’s article in The New Atlantis, The Myth of Multitasking

In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.” The psychologist who led the study called this new “infomania” a serious threat to workplace productivity. One of the Harvard Business Review’s “Breakthrough Ideas” for 2007 was Linda Stone’s notion of “continuous partial attention,” which might be understood as a subspecies of multitasking: using mobile computing power and the Internet, we are “constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing.”

How often have you been in a meeting, and suddenly realised that someone you thought was in the meeting was in fact temporarily “absent”, as he/she looks at her inbox (and not always with the BlackBerry under the table; sometimes it is quite open. What message does that send to everyone else in the room, aside from those doing the same thing?).

Corporate control

One of my dislikes is our telling clients that we are always available 24/7.

Leaving aside that I am not (and so the claim is not strictly truthful), do my clients really want me to be available 24/7? When the job requires it, yes: but not all the time.

And how are we? The BlackBerry. I don’t have one (I gave it back) and I live in an area where there is no mobile coverage. But most of my colleagues do, and having one is very much seen as having ‘arrived’ (quite where is not clear) and even more when they are allowed to upgrade to the new model. They clearly haven’t read The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr,

The Blackberry has become the most visible symbol of the expansion of corporate control over people’s lives. Connected wirelessly to corporate servers, the ubiquitous gadget forms an invisible tether tying employees to their jobs. . . Many people feel a genuine sense of empowerment when they use their BlackBerry or otherwise connect from afar to their corporate network. They welcome the technology because it “frees” them to work whenever and wherever they want, making them more productive and successful in their jobs. The price they pay, of course, is a loss of autonomy, as their employers gain greater control over their time, their activities and even their thoughts. “Even though I’m home,” another BlackBerry user told the Journal, “I’m not necessarily there.”

For more from Nicholas Carr, see his blog Rough Type. It doesn’t always make comfortable reading (his latest post is on Twitter ~ a corrective to the recent law blog posts such as Law tweeting proposition 2 in Binary Law).

. . . and yes, I occasionally tweet (but not that often).

Wishful thinking?

Somewhat late in posting, but see this post (it links back to my Selling time post earlier in the month).

Fees to rise despite client pressure, say lawyers

Wishful thinking? Speaking with clients this morning at one of our regular Breakfast Clubs, it is clear that we cannot take anything for granted. What this period of economic uncertainty now offers us is an opportunity to revisit the relationship between lawyers and clients as regards fees and value: and to move the agenda to value.