Cats at Bacchanalia

Cats Legal kindly asked me to speak at their client event last night. More compelling than me as an attraction, I suspect, was the fact that the venue was Bacchanalia , the specialists in fine Spanish wines, whose premises are on the floor above Cats Legal at Broken Wharf, close by the Millennium Bridge. To have spoken last week overlooking Sydney Harbour (as recounted here), and then to do so with the Thames at my back shows how lucky I am in the platforms offered to me.

Broken Wharf is above and to the right of the right-hand pier of the Millennium Bridge

Collecting evidence for Ofsted and its parallels with e-Disclosure

Here is a nicely ambiguous Google search. My blog stats include a list of the terms which people used to find the site, and one from earlier in the week was “collecting evidence for ofsted”. The search was presumably made by some poor blighter trying to run a school. Instead of concentrating on educating children, he or she must instead collect evidence about something which Ofsted requires. One of the more amusing aspects of a recent e-disclosure case was the contrast between Ofsted’s officious punctiliousness  in demanding information from schools and its own incompetence when required to produce documents in the Sharon Shoesmith litigation.

Ofsted is the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills. The mismatch between its name and its acronym derives from the empire-building of the last Secretary of State for Education, the unpleasant Ed Balls who, baulked of his ambition to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, renamed himself Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. There is a certain type of politician who thinks that he gains lustre by having more words in his department’s name, and one of the many grounds on which Balls was loathed by almost everyone was the way he used the breadth implied by his department’s new name to stick his oar into anything which involved young people, however peripherally. His successor restored the name Department of Education so quickly that one suspected that the signage had been commissioned before the election, emphasising the commitment to what really matters. It is that which provides my link to client objectives in litigation.

The Google searcher would have found my site because I use Ofsted’s conduct of its disclosure in the Shoesmith litigation to illustrate how disclosure failures are more often the product of stupidity, ignorance and indolence than of any misunderstanding of the law. Some paper-shuffler missed the fact that his My Documents folder included a sub-folder clearly marked “Haringey Inquiry” and a mail folder similarly entitled, and had to confess to this just before judgment was delivered. The judge has demanded to know how this happened.

A meaningless comment about technology in court

An outraged e-mail came in from Dominic Regan early on Saturday morning. Headed “The most stupid comment of the year”, Dominic’s message drew attention to the report in the Times about the Saville Inquiry into the Northern Ireland shootings. The report included a quotation about the Inquiry’s use of technology: “without it, the tribunal would have had to be more focused”. I will not take up space with the exclamation marks with which Dominic followed this.

What do you think the author of this comment meant? Did the tribunal lose sight of its remit because technology was used? If the whole thing had been done from paper, would the tribunal have concentrated more closely? Does technology blur the vision – if so, then a visit to the optician is called for, not a woolly implication that technology encourages loss of focus.

I have binned the paper, and the Times web site is no longer accessible, so I don’t know who made the comment or what weight to attach to it. Its supposed author may have been misquoted. Its context is a negative one, so I assume that a negative meaning was intended. I just don’t know what it does mean.

It is curiously reminiscent of the sort of thing you hear from technology-deniers in other civil procedure contexts – you can just imagine a judge resisting the use of technology in litigation on the grounds that lawyers were much more focused in the days when everything was printed and filed in ring binders and read by eye. Actually, you do not have to imagine it.

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