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.

Blade encounters an interesting vignette of angst in the City on the Roll On Friday site. You can find the full thread in the community section of the site (under ’something has been bothering me’), but in a nutshell, a (presumably female) lawyer was walking home through the City when a young girl asked if she might stop and do her a favour. The lawyer’s immediate reaction was to assume that she was being set up by some bag snatchers (the fear of a bag being stolen prompts Blade to assume her feminine gender). She therefore walked on and ignored the young girl, who promptly burst into tears.
The lawyer, unable to rid her mind of the incident, asks what she should have done. One response is that she should have pushed the girl into the gutter. Blade suspects that this was not posted by a personal injury lawyer. Or one with knowledge of the criminal law. But he fears that it was, indeed, a genuine response from one of m’learned friends.
The pictured lawyer is from Milan. Blade suspects that had this incident occurred in Italy, it may well have played out differently.
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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