All I really knew was that I had found the perfect place on the perfect wave, and I had remained there endlessly. Forever.
Allan Weisbecker, from In Search of Captain Zero: A Surfer’s Road Trip Beyond the End of the Road.

Hats off to the man thus far known only as Darren, who solved Belle de Jour’s identity six years ago but then resolved to keep it secret. Not only that, Darren also alerted Belle to the fact that the Mail was on her trail, after setting up a “Googlewhack” of Belle de Jour and Brooke Magnanti, creating the only page on the internet where the two terms appeared together in an unrelated context.
But check out that page again. Or rather, just read the following, the synopsis of an essay by Magnanti in her PhD guise on the nature of autopsies:
‘The autopsy is an examination of the body as machine, a hardware hack on hopeless equipment. As with some bugs you may never find out what went wrong. There may be several ailments: a pancreatic cancer, say; a cirrhotic liver. The evidence of death is incontrivertible, but the cause is an eel slipping out of your hands.’
‘Incontrivertible’?
Pictured courtesy of kevincrumb: Darren’s favourite film.
In this article, Gavin Ingham Brooke and Rohit Grover of Spada examine the importance of marketing and PR in a downturn. This article was originally published in Solicitors Journal, Practice Management Supplement, 28 April 2009, and has been reproduced by kind permission.
Environmental Reporting: Trends in FTSE 100 Sustainability Reports
In the latest of our series of white papers, Spada Research examines trends in environmental reporting. The white paper is available for download here.
Now available for download here is Spada’s latest white paper. Entitled ‘The Laity Bytes Back’, the paper looks at Web 2.0 and the professions.
In this paper, published in the International Journal of Business and Economics, David Brock, Tal Yaffe and Mark Dembovsky scrutinise large law firms, their strategies and measures of their effectiveness.
In this article, Gavin Ingham Brooke, MD of Spada, looks at how US law firms should approach hiring a UK PR agency. The piece is reproduced from Strategies – The Journal of Legal Marketing by kind permission of the Legal Marketing Association.
Towards 2012 – The New Legal Landscape
Spada’s white paper on the impact of the Legal Services act is now available to download here. The research recently featured on the front page of the Law Society Gazette.
Information Inflation: Can the Legal System Adapt?
George L. Paul, a partner in Lewis and Roca, LLP and Jason R. Baron, Director of Litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, discuss the “new inflationary dynamic” of information in this article from the Richmond Journal of Law and Technology. How do vast quantities of new writing forms challenge the legal profession, and how should lawyers adapt?
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