Revolutionary video pillory for PR consultants

The humour for the week was provided by Charles Christian, whose Orange Rag included a piece about PR consultants called So that’s why the editor is grumpy and aptly illustrated by a video.

I should make clear in passing this on that the PR consultants with whom I deal are of the highest quality and would not dream of representing their clients in the manner indicated in the video. That combination of words indicative of excitement and uniqueness delivered in a flat monotone redolent of ignorance and boredom is, however, something with which I am not unfamiliar, and I am happy to do my bit to improve the PR industry by passing on the link.

My own view on this is that if they were forced to remove expressions like “the best”, “revolutionary” and “unique”, they would have to find other words to fill the space, and might come up with something which actually gave a us a clue what their clients’ applications do, why they might be useful to a lawyer, and why they are worth a look.

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Capturing web pages with iCyte now for the Enterprise

The latest addition to my collection of tools for gathering and storing information is a product called iCyte. I cannot improve on the maker’s own description as follows:

iCyte is a browser add-on and web service that lets users save any web page that interests them on iCyte’s servers, along with their highlights on important text, plus notes and tags. These saved “Cytes” are organized in projects to form a searchable, shareable knowledge base accessible from any computer. Unlike bookmarks, Cytes are retrievable even if the original web pages have been removed or changed.

There are apparently already thousands of individual iCyte users, attracted by the ability to store anything from academic, legal or corporate research to – well, anything which interests you really. My screen-shot shows the beginnings of a collection of case reports.

Pre-action spoliation of evidence in English law

An article by Professor Peter Hibbert of the College of Law in the Commercial Litigation Journal explores the extent to which English law includes the concept of spoliation of evidence. Why does this arise now, and what are the implications for disclosure in England & Wales?

The judgment of HHJ Simon Brown QC in Earles v Barclays Bank Plc [2009] EWHC 2500 (Mercantile) (08 October 2009), is interesting for various reasons. It captured attention mainly for the costs penalty suffered by the defendants as a result of their failure to disclose documents directly relevant to the central issue; no less important, in my view, was the judge’s careful analysis of the primacy of contemporaneous documents as evidence, distinct from the formalities which the rules provide for disclosing it.

At a yet different level are the questions which arose as to the extent of the duty to preserve documents which might be required in future litigation. Although it is commonly thought that the US test is more stringent than the one provided by English law, that is really because the penalties for getting it wrong in the US (in the form of sanctions) are more severe than in the UK. But if the fear of losing your costs may weigh less heavily than the US fear of sanctions, the risk that you might actually lose the case for want of documents which would prove your position should also have a place in deciding what to keep and what to destroy.