Nigel goes over the top on his bottom for Help for Heroes

Nigel Murray, managing director of Huron Legal in London, is limbering up for his annual bike ride to raise money for Help for Heroes.

This year the ride is across the Great War battlefields of north-eastern France.  It involves 375 miles in five days, no mean feat for a man of a certain age whose posterior is more used to a comfortable seat at a desk, in an aeroplane or in a restaurant, and who can often be found with a beer, a cigarette or both in his hands.

Nigel has raised over £15,000 over the three years in which he has done this ride. This year he is to be joined by a team from Huron’s London office – a fine instance of leadership by example.

I used the expression “over the top” in my heading for a reason. It has come to be associated with divas having hissy fits, with the extravagance of some electronic discovery or with the faux outrage of the Daily Mail as it incites its readers to get worked up over some triviality. The expression in fact derives from those same trenches which the Help for Heroes cyclists will see as they cross France.  Nothing one can imagine could equal the terror one would feel, and the courage one would need, waiting in a trench for the dawn whistle which was the signal to climb over the parapet and out into the shelling, machine-gun fire and barbed wire which lay over the top – officers and men in the shared democracy of death and injury.

Postscript to Dominic Regan interview on Jackson and costs management

The transcript of my interview with Dominic Regan (see Professor Dominic Regan on why the Jackson Reforms mean the biggest ever upheaval for UK litigation) seems to have attracted some attention. There are two follow-up links in which you may be interested, both to points referred to during the interview.

The first is Dominic’s interview with Lord Justice Jackson which he has now written up for New Law Journal under the heading Jackson on Jackson. Those with an interest in electronic disclosure will focus on two things – the promise of training for judges in costs management and this blunt warning to practitioners towards the end of the article:

They should start to think about costs budgeting now and also look to embrace technology. The days of paper are numbered.

Many in my profession, I know, treat a deadline as the starting gun. I remember fondly my conversation with a law firm partner six months after the UK Bribery Act came into force. I mentioned it as a reason for lawyers to become acquainted with the technology which exists both to identify deviations from the norm in a proactive way and to enable efficient reaction to requests by regulators or prosecutors. “The Bribery Act”, he said. “Ah, remind me…”.

Getting the eDiscovery word out there with WordPress and Google Plus

One does not have to be obsessive about web rankings to be interested in the reach of one’s blog posts, particularly in an industry which constantly evolves – or, as recently, takes the occasional big jump. Can one be heard beyond one’s regular readers, in an area of business in which everyone has something to shout about?

Idle curiosity made me do a search yesterday morning on Google.com for judge peck da silva moore. I was pleased to see that an article of mine – published less than 24 hours previously and in competition with many US articles – appeared on the first page of search results. A search for peck predictive coding, again in Google.com, had my article at the top.

A post by Millnet’s Charles Holloway (or, strictly, the home page of Millnet’s blog) also appeared on the first page of the first of those searches. Amongst the things Charles and I have in common (being English solicitors with an interest in US eDiscovery is a prerequisite for what I am talking about) is our use of WordPress as our blogging platform. I chose WordPress originally (this was in 2006) because tests showed that it had better SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) than Google’s own blogging platform.