Government says Bribery Act on course for April commencement

There has been talk of a late review of the Bribery Act, due to come into force in April. Much of this has been floated by those who consider that Britain’s competitiveness in international markets will be hampered if British companies are not allowed to bribe and be bribed with the best of them (I paraphrase, a little). The arguments are summarised, and demolished, by an article on thebriberyact with the uncompromising heading The Bribery Act and the review by No. 10: Will pigs fly? We don’t think so.

That prediction appears to be reinforced by an answer given in the House of Lords yesterday – I say “appears” because the Government’s answer does not in fact match the question (asked if commencement will be in April, the minister talks of “commencement of the Act in spring this year” and spring perhaps extends into May. I suspect that years of working for the Blair-Brown government has made the civil servants unaccustomed to giving straight answers to questions.

I was not aware of an outfit called Transparency International, but its head is today reported in TrustLaw as “hopeful that implementation of the Bribery Act 2010 is still on track” whilst warning that Transparency International “will take seriously any attempts to water down the legislation”. I doubt that this on its own will make the government quake in its boots, but it is hard to reconcile the unqualified certainty of the government spokesman quoted by thebribaryact with the faint odour of dragged feet which appears in the TrustLaw article. We shall see.

Meanwhile, some commentators appear to need reminding that bribery is a crime anyway.

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Exposing your thinking parts to the outsourcing discussion

That old image of the ostrich burying its head in the sand is apparently unfair. The purpose is apparently to use the ground as a sounding board, vibrations giving advance warning of problems to come. This prosaic reality undermines that quotation from the great libel silk George Carman,who said of one claimant that he “behaved like an ostrich and put his head in the sand, thereby exposing his thinking parts”.

I used to have reservations myself about mentioning outsourcing, but that was because every reference to it brought down on my head a stream of offers from people wanting to tell me at nauseating length about the services which they could offer without, apparently, making any attempt to establish whether I was likely to be a buyer. I stemmed the flow eventually by abandoning my usual courtesy and telling them exactly what I thought of their marketing.

It does not matter whether you prefer the traditional picture of the ostrich’s motives or take the revisionist view that it is just getting early warning of what is coming. Lawyers, whether in private practice or in companies, need to expose their thinking parts to different ways of covering the ground. Most information management involves a mixture of technology, grunt work and high intellectual input, and the trick is to work out how much of which you need to apply to what. You cannot begin this without some idea of what is on offer from both technology suppliers and from those who offer to do the parts which you cannot do cost-effectively yourself – or, to put it more accurately, which someone else can do at least as well at a lower cost.

I was recently invited to take part in the Global LPO (Legal Process Outsourcing) Conference, organised by KPO Consultants and taking place in London on 2 and 3 March.  It had a good spread of speakers already engaged, including general counsel from big employers and people from law firms, the Law Society and the Legal Services Board, together with David Kemp from technology provider Autonomy .

Recommind expands in UK and EU with hires and hosting

A couple of years ago, Charles Christian of the Orange Rag observed that whilst other providers made a lot of noise about what they were going to do in the UK market, Recommind quietly got on with making sales. The company has been less quiet about it lately, particularly in law firm enterprise search, as can be seen if you just run your eye down the list of press releases, with Mills & Reeve, Mischcon de Reya, Macfarlanes and Clifford Chance all named in the first page.

These in-house information systems, all rebranded during 2010 with the Decisiv label (Search, E-mail Management and Categorisation) have been joined over the same period by ediscovery / e-disclosure products with the name Axcelerate (one covering ECA and Collection and one for Review and Analysis). The same softly-softly approach to marketing has been evident with these products. My evidence as to Recommind’s penetration with these products is anecdotal, consisting largely of hearing the name mentioned by lawyers and others to whom I speak. It turns up enough for me to know that the products are getting serious attention.

I now know Recommind rather better than I did when Charles Christian made that comment, but it remains a mystery to me how so small a European team achieves this, particularly as there is business being done in Germany as well (see a video made by Project Counsel at IQPC in Munich, in which European Director Simon Price and European Sales Director Hartwig Laute are interviewed).

Two new developments signal the end of this low-key approach. One is the appointment of additional staff in London, including a Regional Sales Manager, a Regional Manager for E-discovery and sales engineering staff. The press release is headed Recommind doubles London presence and expands European operations by 30%, which says it all.