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.
Lester and Libel (and a general election)
November 30, 2009
Roy Greenslade sums up Lord Lester’s proposals for reform of the libel laws in this post. Lester, a Liberal Democrat peer, is drawing up a Defamation Reform Bill which would:
1. Reform contingency fee agreements (aka no-win no-fee deals), memorably described by David Hooper as “the ransom factor” in contemporary libel litigation given that the costs racked up by claimant lawyers make it expensive for publishers to defend themselves.
2. End the principle of “multiple publication”, which means that internet sites can be sued over archived articles. Lester proposes the replacement of this with a “single publication rule”.
3. Prevent foreigners from suing in the British courts unless they can demonstrate that they have suffered real harm in Britain.
4. Enhance the public interest (qualified privilege) defence, which is presently somewhat of a hurdling exercise.
Professor Greenslade also notes that the Sunday Times, which carried Lester’s proposals yesterday, is currently being sued by Russia’s richest woman. He omits to say, however, that with a general election but a few months away, the worry must be that the sound and fury generated by the media over the state of the libel laws may ultimately signify nothing, lost amid backbench reshuffles and empty politico rhetoric.
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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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