I don’t care what you say about me. Just be sure to spell my name wrong.
Barbra Streisand, 1942 – present, American singer and actress.
Much has been made of “Chinese anger” after a South Korean TV station filmed and broadcast a secret dress rehearsal of the Olympics opening ceremony. From his vantage point among various of the UK’s sports and IP lawyers, Blade would merely point out that for ‘Chinese’ anger, read, in such circumstances, ‘every Olympic Host Nation’.
The Olympics present a vast contractual nexus. The opening and closing ceremonies for the Athens Games involved over 1,000 contracts alone. That’s a lot of legal work, but one thing the lawyers are sworn to, and seek to preserve, is secrecy. Each Host Nation tries to outdo its predecessor’s opening and closing festivities, all of which are kept rigorously under wraps. When an enterprising local newspaper hired a plane and flew over one of the stadia at the Melbourne Games, to take sneak pictures of the rehearsals, an almighty fuss erupted, as would be the case at any Games where the surprise of the ceremonies seemed to have been undone.
It strikes Blade, therefore, that the talk of China’s allegedly reprehensible state secrecy laws is misplaced. We’re dealing with media rights issues and commercial confidentiality, as enforced by contract, and that’s it.
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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