hmmm
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.
Black Rod at PCC Helm
March 31, 2009
Congratulations to Sir Michael Willocks, the man formerly known as Black Rod, on his appointment as Press Complaints Commission commissioner. Black Rod replaces outgoing chief of the PCC Sir Christopher Meyer.
Black Rod’s full former title was the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod. His duties included carrying the Mace into and out of the chamber for the Speaker of the House of Lords and presiding over various ceremonies surrounding the State Opening of Parliament and the Throne speech. He would also be the man tasked with arresting any Lord guilty of breach of privilege or other Parliamentary offence.
Willocks’ experience will stand him in good stead when it comes to dealing with our miscreant press, but one Fleet Street editor was sanguine: “Black Rod is a good man, and we look forward to working with him. We don’t think there is any danger of him thinking that he can start dressing up and wielding a rod at us, but if he does, we will remind him of the PCC’s traditional function – to make obscure barking noises from time to time, but never, ever to bite.”
Pictured thanks to Vincent: a man using a black fishing rod.
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Knowledge Bank
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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