Free e-disclosure podcast from CPDCast

I recorded a podcast last week with James Sheedy of CPDCast. You can listen to it for free and solicitors, barristers and ILEX member can get CPD points for doing so. There is a note at the bottom of this post explaining how to access the podcast.

I have to say that I prefer an audience I can see to a microphone in a padded cell. From the audience perspective, however, there is obvious benefit in having talks like this delivered to their desks and downloadable to an MP3 player, although they don’t then see the slides with which I usually illustrate the subject. I have been asked to do more of these, including a longer series covering the full range of topics – more on this when we have advanced our plans.

What was interesting for me was that James Sheedy composed the questions after some (impressively fast and thorough) research of the subject from scratch. Although much of the ground covered was inevitably the same as that which I devise for myself, the outsider’s perspective helps to bring out aspects which I do not necessarily think of. One of his questions, for example, was predicated on the assumption that the lawyer starts with a room full of paper. The challenge is to persuade people to investigate a purely electronic solution BEFORE existing electronic sources are turned into paper at vast expense in printing and copying.

The FSA swoops on the unprepared

The American Museum of Natural History in New York contains many tableaux – scenes of animals and man in various stages of early development. My son and I spent an afternoon in there when LegalTech had ended and I found that I recognised many familar types from the litigation world amongst the figures, most obviously (too obviously perhaps) the dinosaurs of whom I wrote in LegalTech lessons from extinct species.

I have now been through the photographs which I took with half an eye on their value as illustrations to this commentary. You may expect to see pictures of walruses and buffalo who look like judges,  primitive men for whom technology meant flints and whose idea of co-operation involved spears and clubs (you know who I mean,  all you who use discovery / disclosure as a bludgeon) and, of course, dinosaurs.