There’s been a lot of chatter this afternoon on Twitter about Nick Holmes Free Legal Web project. Today he posted his manifesto (not as scarily Soviet-era as it sounds) that outlines the (rather ambitious, I can’t help but think) goals and dreams of the project. Nick’s ‘plausible promise’ is that he will:

spearhead the development of the Free Legal web — a service that joins up the law and legal commentary and analysis on the web and delivers a useful service to both lawyers and the community at large. I need a commitment from a handful of others with complementary skills and expertise to kick-start the project. All suggestions are welcome and necessary to drive this forward.

The goal is to create a ‘joined-up’ free legal web, in some way making accessible all the officially provided free information (opsi, hansard, etc) as well as blogs, legal wikis, and other free available, but ‘unofficial’ sources of legal information. All in all a very laudable goal, I must say.

This is in line with the goals of the Power of Information Task Force,who are working to public sector information more accessible to the people. (There’s even a £20k prize if you think of something they really like!)

I think that at it’s core this is a really good idea – I’m all for making information more accessible, and taking some of the control away from the legal publishers, who currently hold the legal sector to ransom for their ‘official’ information sources. As Nick says in his manifesto, legal blogs and wikis are producing some fantastic commentary and discussion on legal issues, and are far more timely and accessible than journal articles and books. And it would be great to have a central location for accessing, searching and disseminating information from both the ‘official’ and ‘non official’ freely available legal sources.

The big question that hangs over the project though, is how is it going to be done? Will it simply be a portal site (though this ground is already covered very competently by Nick’s excellent Infolaw.)? A federated search engine? A mashup of rss feeds that you can set-up according to your own interests?

I think this is a fantastic opportunity to make use of semantic web style metadata. I don’t really know enough about the semantic web to start having an intelligent discussion about how it would actually work in practice but a semantic metadata powered search engine/giant mash up might be an idea? A quick web search reveals a number of discussions already in place regarding the construction of legal ontologies for semantic web markup.

A cohesive effort to get people using a shared ontology and semantic markup for the pages would be a great step forward, and would hopefully start paving the way for future (free) uses of legal information on the web.

Lots of concerns spring to mind too though, not the least some very disgruntled legal publishers. The sheer volume of (presumably) volunteer effort will make it a slow going process. Getting the combined online legal community on board might also be a challenge. And getting everyone to come to a decision? Fraught, but not necessarily impossible.

This is a very off-the-cuff response to what is a very ambitious and multi-faceted plan. I’m sure given more thought I’ll be able to think of many more things to say about it. I do, however, think it’s a great and very laudable idea, and am looking forward to seeing how the project progresses!

Working in a law firm there will come a time when you are asked to do research that goes against your personal morals. Law firms have the potential to deal with controversial issues, that you may personally find uncomfortable.  These could be religious, environmental, personal/human rights issues or even just situations or topics that you don’t necessarily disagree with but find uncomfortable anyway.

Hopefully, this is something that you’ll only experience very rarely.  But how to deal with it when it does happen?

I’ve been pretty lucky in my career that I’ve been able to mostly avoid this happening. But ever since the first time it did, I’ve been aware that it might happen to me again. The first time I was able to avoid asking too many questions about why a particular piece of research was needed, and only had to do a very superficial job.  Next time, I might not be so lucky so I thought I’d brainstorm a few ways of dealing with it.

1.  Pass it on to a colleague. This is not so useful if you are in a one person library, or the sole researcher. But there is the possibility that one of your coworkers may not feel as strongly about an issue as you do.
2. Stand up and say something to the person who requested it. This probably isn’t a very good option, but you could at least make your feelings known. If you’re lucky, the requester might be someone who’s willing to pass the research onto a trainee, or even do it themselves. This does have the potential of backfiring unfortunately but could gain you respect as someone who stands up for what they believe in even if in the end you end up doing the research anyway.
3. Say nothing and do the research. This rankles with me, but if option one fails, this is the option I think I’d be most likely to go with unfortunately.  I don’t personally think I have the confidence yet to stand up to someone and say that no I’m not doing that piece of research.

And then I come to a screeching halt. So, is this something that any of you have had to deal with? And if so, what was your strategy?

I was reading Real Lawyers Have Blogs on blogging policies for companies. As he says, most companies now do have (or should have) internet and email use policies, and it’s not a terribly far leap from there to a blogging policy. I do wonder, though, about how this would be implemented.

I’m of two minds at the moment about internet and email policies – though there is a ‘best practice’ notional idea of what should be allowed and what shouldn’t, what actually is and isn’t allowed is a completely different thing. Across the law firms that I have worked at, and through talking to friends at other firms, I have encountered a wide range of policies, from seemingly complete freedom to install programs, chat, email, browse and generally do what you like, to middling policies that restrict ‘inappropriate’ sites and don’t allow installation of programs or chat protocols, but do allow pretty much anything else, to the highly draconian, no personal emails at all through work channels, no webmail access, and severely restricted internet access.

Email and internet use at work is a tricky thing. You don’t want your employees wasting their time when they could be being productive, but on the other hand, it is by now unreasonable to assume that all internet use is friviolous. I feel more productive, and certainly more relaxed at work, when I have the freedom to check my RSS feeds, and my ebay auctions, my webmail and my bank account. Indeed, I feel that internet use is so closely woven into many peoples lives now, that it is more productive to allow them some freedom of internet use. It seems, to an extent, to come down to how much trust an employer has in its employees, and how an emplyees time is perceived – whether your workplace feels that it owns all of your working hours, or whether you are trusted to be able to monitor your own productivity and workflows.

However, mostly, issues between employee and employer don’t crop up until it becomes a major issue – massive loss of productivity through internet use, malicious emails or attachments that break the server, and blogs that harm the reputation of the company. These are, obviously, not the ideal, and should be dealt with appropriately.

I do worry that there may be more cases such as the one that Real Lawyers cites, from Hegarty Solicitors where and employee caught updating a blog at work “was disciplined and told that if they continued to write the blog at work they may be later dismissed.” (and no, I’m not going to mention how much of this post was written whilst at work – can’t be getting myself in trouble now).

Blogging, like all other internet activities, is by no means inherently bad. Indeed, not even all work-related blogging is harmful. Employees can blog, even from work, without harming their productivity, endangering the IT infrastructure of their workplace, or slandering their work. And I very much hope that when employers come to write policies that include the use of blogs, that they realise this. It will be a very sad day indeed if a workplace decides to ban Blogger (or WordPress, or Facebook, or Myspace, or Livejournal, or whatever), because they perceive all blogging to be harmful.