Lawslot

Just as the police suffer from being typecast, so too do lawyers. I enjoy The Policeman’s Blog, but the most recent post Leeches, Vultures and Sturmey Archer, did nothing for my lawyerly self-esteem (you need to read the whole post: the original story was in the Daily Telegraph),

‘Village bobby’ (he’s actually a PCSO but for once that’s a mere detail) Nick Barker has spent the last who-knows-how-long pootling round the Kent countryside on a bike, doing all the usual village bobby things.
Now he’s been stopped, on health-and-safety grounds.
The problem is, he hasn’t passed Kent Police’s ‘two-day Basic Police Cycle Skills course’.
Until he can pass this course, he’s having to travel around the villages he looks after by bus and on foot.
A Kent spokeswoman said: “All officers must complete a bicycle training course before they can ride a bike on duty, it is about ensuring their safety and the safety of those around them. The purpose of the course is to ensure they have all the relevant skills and knowledge to make the best use of the bike within their roles.”
Dear God in Heaven, how have we come to this?
‘All the relevant skills and knowledge’ to ride a bike? That would be getting on, pedalling and getting off, then. Two day course, £200 a day for the trainer. It’s nice work if you can get it.
It’s not fair to blame Kent Police. All major publicly-funded organisations are led by unimaginative and cowardly timeservers who have forgotten what real life is like.
No, the blame lies on the shoulders of the lawyers, hovering overhead and waiting for Nick Barker to fall off his bike.
What next? Barker goes on the course – and still falls off. Sue the trainers? The bicycle manufacturers? The highways people? Who cares? Sue anyone, as long as you sue someone.
And who foots the bill for these leeches? You.

At a dinner last month, the host (Chairman of a Business Angels Network) and I realised that we were probably the oldest two in a room of 50. It is not that we are that old (mid-50s), but that in the work we do clients and colleagues are getting younger. Law 21, one of my law blog feeds, had a series of interesting posts some weeks ago on the issues both of employing Generation Y and having Generation Y as clients.

Law 21 is Canadian law blog, but the problems either side of the Atlantic are the same, and there is little difference in the way we approach the issues (or, as is often the case, don’t), and it is certainly not just technology but culture as well.

I thought of this again the day before yesterday. The day started at Twofour Communications in Plymouth, at an event both celebrating their 20 years in business and targeted at the South West professional community, to whom they would like to sell more services. What was most noticeable was that almost without exception the guests were a generation older than the hosts (which led me to ask whether they had in fact asked the right people). At the end of the day Caroline and I were at The Northcott Theatre in Exeter, for a concert by Tasmin Little and John Lenehan, as part of the Exeter Summer Festival. Here we were among the younger members of the audience. The contrast between my day’s start and finish could not have been clearer, or more illustrative of the the different worlds in which we now live and work.

Generational issues are much in my mind as a lawyer, and not just the prospect of employing Graduate Divas. Nicholas Carr’s closing to his latest book, The Big Switch, is relevant both to lawyers, and also to Twofour,

All technical change is generational change. The full power and consequence of a new technology are unleashed only when those who have grown up with it become adults and begin to push their parents to the margins. As the older generations die, they take with them their knowledge of what was lost when the new technology arrived, and only the sense of what was gained remains. It is in this way that progress covers its tracks, perpetually refreshing the illusion that where we are is where we were meant to be.

Life was ever thus.

Helienne Lindvall, writing in guardian.co.uk this morning, identifies the problem we face, when complaining about the steady encroachment of civil liberties: not just that the authorities take a very black and white view, along the lines, “If you are not in favour of it, you must be against it”, or worse, Gordon Brown’s argument “that new state powers were guarantors of liberty, not threats to it”, but that for many of our fellow citizens, why worry,

“Many people are of the opinion that if you’re not doing anything untoward or illegal you have nothing to worry about. This argument has also been used when it comes to the latest news of UK councils snooping on their constituents. But, knowing people who get interrogated every time they pass the US borders (some of them are even US citizens), because they work for perfectly legal organisations like Peta and Amnesty International, I think the expression “in the interest of national security” is open to a wide range of interpretations.”

Her subheading is that regular monitoring is nothing new to Swedish citizens, and

“In fact, I’ve probably been flagged up for writing this.”

You and me both!

One of my housekeeping tasks each day is to clear out both my inbox and my sent items each day, although there is an element of cheating, inasmuch as I often simply move the emails to two other folders: ‘client emails to be filed’ (which my secretary then deals with, although I am told SOS Direct will enable me to direct emails to the right client folder, once we get it) and ‘office emails to be filed’ (which I then archive every week or so). There is, however, a semblance of order although two days out of the office means a lot of “email cleansing” when I get back.

John Naughton’s post Controlling the email monster in his Memex 1.1 blog this morning (which in turn links to Luis Suarez’s I freed myself from E-mail’s grip) was spot on,

The bottom line, though, is that organisational email has to be brought back under control. Someone once told me that one of the big supermarket chains — it may be ASDA — has a policy in its open-plan HQ that when anyone’s on email they have to wear a red baseball cap. It’s wacky, but might just work.

The mess that is organisational email is actually a symptom of the failure of ICT systems to provide software services that workers really need. Why, for example, do you find that office workers have email inboxes with thousands of messages in them? Answer: because it gives them an electronic filing system that they can use. So instead of being an indicator of how hopeless people are at managing ICT, overflowing inboxes are actually a measure of how ingenious humans are when faced with useless technology.

I am not sure that red baseball caps will work for us (and some of my colleagues would never be able to take them off) but it’s an idea.

What is perhaps more interesting is how long emails will survive. My children now only use email to keep in touch with us; with each other it is instant messaging (and even with us: whether through Facebook or Skype). They don’t yet Twitter, but I am sure that they will soon.

If it is not the government, it is the EU prepared to play fast and loose with our civil liberties.  See Mark Townsend in The Observer this morning,

“The EU is close to finalising an agreement with the US that would allow the FBI to see the internet browsing habits and credit card histories of UK citizens. However, the prospect of an agreement between Brussels and Washington that will lower barriers to swapping previously private data, including travel history and spending patterns, will alarm civil rights advocates.

Talks about the transfer of highly personal information held by the UK government and leading companies to American security agencies began following the September 2001 terrorist attacks. US counter-terrorism officials argued that increased information on the movements and habits of European residents would help prevent a repeat attack.

Details of a joint report by US and EU negotiators indicate that progress on the agreement is advanced, following years of opposition from European states with stricter privacy laws. One final hurdle still to be cleared is whether British and European citizens can sue the US government over its handling of their personal data.

Another area of concern relates to what ‘appropiate safeguards’ have been agreed to prevent the US authorities from requesting further information such as the religion, political opinion and ’sexual life’ of a British resident.”

Appropriate safeguards? Don’t hold your breath.

Catching up with a week of feeds after a hectic few days, my eye was caught by John Naughton’s post in Memex 1.1 Inside the bunker, linking to the FT’s piece about life in Number 10 (and perfectly juxtaposed with Naughton’s subsequent post, Hitler: the remix. When will someone do the same for Gordon: I would, if I had the IT skill: the Lisbon Treaty, Henley, Wendy Alexander etc.).

Now, this morning, Willem Buiter’s post in his FT Maverecon blog, Manners matter – especially for powerful individuals and institutions. This is Buiter’s conclusion on the Treasury, so long the home and fiefdom of Gordon Brown,

Politicians and others in positions of power should be judged not only on the quality of the decisions they take and the choices they make, but also on the manners they display in their public and administrative roles.  The arrogance of power manifests itself in unnecessary brutality and cruelty – sometimes born of ignorance or indifference, sometimes deliberate – toward those whom it considers ‘disposable’.  As the most powerful government department, the Treasury displays contempt for and nastiness towards those whom it considers to be obstacles to the effective pursuit of its goals, more frequently and with greater intensity than other institutions.

Even when the goals of the Treasury are aligned with the public interest, there is no presumption that these ends will justify the means used to achieve them.  This is true even when these means are necessary; it is true a fortiori if the means are unnecessary ‘bad manners’ add-ons.

In practice, even the goals of the Treasury can be in conflict with the committed pursuit of the public interest.  They may represent no more than the opportunistic pursuit of party-political or other sectional interests.  To use gratuitous nastiness in the pursuit of the wrong objectives would be the nadir of public policy.  Regrettably we see this too often.

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.

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”

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?).

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).