Heather Townsend

"So you're an international best-selling author!"

Lunch with Heather Townsend was a real privilege and I was honoured she could spare the time to see me now she is in such demand!  Heather's book, Business Networking, an FT Guide to using the power of online on offline networking for business success was only launched on 1 July, but already it has sold almost 2000 copies worldwide. 

Heather has an unusual skill-set.  With a background in engineering (including a degree from Oxford) and logistics, Heather is a master of process - and this is evident in the way she has structured her book: it is designed as an interesting read from cover to cover, but works equally well as a reference tool with a useful summary at the end of each chapter and a list of action points, (Heather is a strong believer in the practical application of new skills as soon as possible after the learning, to embed the new knowledge) as well as tips highlighted in box-outs throughout.  A highly recommended read. (You can order it from Amazon here.)

Heather worked for many years as an in-house training & development partner at BDO Stoy Hayward and today works equally comfortably with accounting and legal partnerships.  Her speciality is equipping professionals for partnership, latterly with a particular focus on how they can use social media to help, by building their networks.  Given her logistics background, she is particularly interested in prescribing systems for management and control of social media, also policies, in larger firms.

Follow Heather on twitter - you'll find her tweets useful.

***

The week started sadly, with reports of Amy Winehouse's death last weekend.  Not surprising, some say, but deeply tragic none-the-less.  Of all the write-ups, I found the Economist's particularly touching, describing how she lived her life backwards: "Barely out of her teens ...she already had the knowing tone of a performer with a lifetime of heartbreak behind her. Then, in her 20s, she set about acquiring the tragic worldliness that the timbre of her voice conveyed."  Read the full Economist report here.







* * *

Judgment Day on Wednesday made this an exceptionally busy and exciting week at Kysen.  The Supreme Court issued no less than five judgments,(clearing the decks before the Summer break do we think?), four of which we have been actively working on.  Phew! 

The Star Wars copyright case was particularly fun to work on: being such a massively loved global brand, the mention of Star Wars caught journalists' interest right away - and sent newspaper picture editors into a lather of excitement.  Subeditors also had a field day with the headlines, for example the Evening Standard's 'Empire Strikes Back in copyright War'.  The judgment brought a legal surprise as well, changing the law more dramatically than many expected and potentially opening the floodgates for foreign copyright litigation in the UK.


This is exactly what we come to work for! 

Martin Waller

"Which journalist would you most like  a one-to-one with?"

- a question put to me years ago by a legal journalist chum Dominic Egan who had just landed a plum job with The Daily Telegraph interviewing top business celebs.  He was having a ball deciding whom to interview each week and enjoying conversations with some of the business world's most fascinating individuals.  "Martin Waller" I answered without hesitation, Deputy City Editor of The Times and then its City Diarist.  Famous for his acerbic wit, his City Diary was the one column that would make me laugh out loud each morning during my daily read of the papers.  "Why don't you invite him out to lunch?" said Dominic.  And I did just that.

It turned out that Martin had a deep interest in the law and we worked on a number of stories together over the years.  I learned a lot about him in the process, particularly how is almost-obsessive attention to detail and insistence on getting every little fact right was what gave him the confidence and the freedom to express such damning opinions in his City Diary column!

So my highlight this week was catching up with Martin over lunch.  Since July last year he is editor of The Times' daily business analysis column Tempus, so we can all enjoy his sharp wit in this format now - he's certainly brought a lot of spark to the column since taking it over.

Interesting talking to Martin about the delicate balance Times journalists have to perfect in covering the biggest (at some points it looked like the only) story of the week: Hackgate.  Times journalists might be owned by News International but you'd never tell that from the independence of their reporting.  There's hope for old-fashioned journalist integrity yet....


***

Not the News of the World

It makes such depressing reading,

I don't really want to add anything further,

other than to point to some of my

favourite satirical cartoons on the topic

Click here for more

***

On a more positive note, we were excited to talk to clients this week about levels of new business wins coming through twitter. We've had similar experience ourselves. In particular, it has been interesting to note that a killer combination appears to be active networking on twitter, coupled with a strong pre-existing market reputation. We have heard a number of stories recently where professionals have, thanks to this social media platform, refreshed old clients or contacts they had lost contact with for years - going on to win new work as a direct result, as these people were reminded of how excellent their work had always been.

A message here for senior partners: don't think that twitter should be the preserve of the firm's associates - it's often the most experienced professionals who have the most to gain....

The Law Society

Interesting talking to The Law Society this week about how Legal Disciplinary Practices are changing the complexion of its membership and what this means for the member services they will need to think about offering in the future.   A legal marketeer client, recently made partner and consequently now a fully paid up Law Society member, pointed out to me the other day the inappropriateness in her eyes of The Law Society's current tag-line: 'supporting solicitors'.  As a new member, every time she receives a communication from her new membership organisation, she says this tagline shouts at her that she is still very much an outsider - despite being named on the official Law Society roll. 


This week I spoke to bods from The Law Society's training and publications teams.  Two years after the advent of LDPs the number of non-lawyer Society members is still relatively small, but of course this will only grow over time.  Moreover, there is now a new generation of legal marketeers starting their careers in the knowledge that 'partnership' is a possible career destination.  That just wasn't on the horizon in my days in-house.  I was curious to know how The Law Society is thinking about this challenge.  Do they see it as their role to develop a set of professional standards, structured career paths and training for non-law professionals in law firms?  Not just marketing and PR professionals of course, but professionals in the finance, IT, HR teams etc as well.  The answer is that it's part of an internal conversation at the moment, but of course it's very early days.  Interesting challenges ahead!


* * *

Jon Busby was charm personified when I met him for lunch this week.  After all his baiting and teasing on twitter, quite honestly I didn't know what to expect!  But his conversation was fascinating, he was charm itself, as I said, and he was very amusing to boot.  


As many of you will know from his very lively twitter feed and blog, Jon is in the business of persuading law firms to maximise the use of technology to re-think the delivery of professional services, perfecting that all-important separation between the commoditisible and the high-value-add.  He has some very interesting observations on how professional firms approach decisions on 'transformative business purchases'.  The partnership decision-making structure doesn't always lend itself particularly well to decisions that are tricky in any business context - about big financial and structural commitments to changing the entire way services are delivered.  But certainly enough people get what he is offering to keep this man very, very busy.


He says he learned early on in his life to keep his presentations short and impactful to avoid the 'glaze-over'.  See above illustration for example of alternative to powerpoint slide. He talked about 'the consensual nod' and the importance of avoiding it - a wonderful phrase he invented to describe how people will sometimes agree with you in a sales pitch just to hurry you to the end!  Love it!


* * *

An amusing postscript 
to the super injunctions furore back in May is the release this week of statistics showing how Twitter's UK following jumped by a third that month, boosted in particular by women over 50 keen to follow the blanket coverage of celebrity shenanigans and their attempts to gag the press and cover their traces.  Great to know this demographic is now fully engaged with Twitter in one sense - but in other ways not really  sure whether this is something to celebrate, or be depressed about....

Other interesting Twitter news this week was the release of Twitter for Newsrooms Now the microblogging site has released an official guide showing reporters how to make the most of Twitter as they go about their daily work.  Nothing new for the initiated, but the mere fact Twitter has bothered to launch this guide shows yet again the impact of social media on the news.


We live in interesting times!

MGI

Nice job in Budapest, working for MGI, one of the largest alliances of independent auditing, accounting and consulting firms in the world: 161 members across 286 offices in 82 countries.  Who said the world of accounting wasn't glamorous!

I was invited to attend this year's European Area Meeting and, among other things, consider MGI's points of difference.  As I reflect now, I'm wondering the extent to which you can simply package a brand and a message around 'trust'.  What I observed was a collection of professionals who know each other uncannily - more so than you see in some individual firms even - who have taken the time to build solid, collaborative reltaionships and who know intimately how best to work together, or refer work between one another.  Nearly all the firm representatives I spoke to named the need to refer clients to an overseas advisor they can totally trust as by far and away the most important benefit of their MGI membership, with referrals from other member firms very much a secondary.

So 'trust'.  Is this enough to hang a brand on?  Considering the damage done to the business world from a distinct lack of trust over the last few years, my current thinking is that, 'soft' as it is, this message would actually pack a powerful punch.

***

Whilst in Hungary, I had the fortune to meet UK- and Mauritius-based accountant and trust specialist Gary Killmister.  Not only is Gary an expert in offshore trust issues (he grew up in Jersey) but he is an alleged cousin, no less, of Lemmy from Motorhead. They even share a surname.

This reminded me of a wonderful story told to me by John McDonnell QC who represented Motorhead in their legal battle with GWR Records before the release of 1916.  John is credited on the album sleeve as 'Big Mac' for his help in allowing the album to see the light of day.

The story he tells though, is that on the first day in court Lemmy et al turned up in matching T-shirts, all emblazoned with the words "Judges Are Nice".  Neat.

* * *

How did this story get such a grip of the headlines this week?

Yes it's significant as the first case of contempt of court involving the internet - particularly as the juror who communicated with a defendant on Facebook caused a multi-million pound drugs trial to derail, and particularly as the juror (and the defendant) now faces up to two years in jail. But what I can't understand is the continual debate on our airwaves this week about how 'even' communication on the social networks now needs to be controlled in the context of a court case, and how this must be impossible to police. Surely it's obvious that the same rules should apply to social platforms as they do to conversations in the real world, telephone contact etc? The one point I will concede is that it's easier to dig out someone's details on Facebook to make that connection. Maybe it's only a matter of time before jurors are secluded for the duration of a trial.

Your view?

Louise Restell

catching up with Louise Restell this week was a revelation.  Louise has been involved with the legal profession for a number of years, her interest beginning when she worked for consumer organisation Which? and had a key role in the consumer working party pushing for legal reform that ultimately led to Legal Services Act. When I caught up with her this week, she had just started her new role at The Law Society, on a project exploring the profession's interaction with its various stakeholders. 

Over coffee she took me through the detail of a lunchtime talk she was about to give staff at the Legal Services Board.  She had been invited to share her thoughts and experience of the profession, and how it interacts with consumers in particular.  Phew!  She wasn't holding anything back!  She has strong views about lawyers' delusions, particularly at High Street firm level, that they are intrinsically better at 'quality of service' than any of these newfangled, Legal-Services-Act-enabled, alternative legal-services-providers could ever hope to be.

On the way back to the office I tweeted Louise wouldn't be pulling any punches in her talk to LSB staff, and the inimitable Jon Busby immediately tweeted back:

 

legaltwo 

Legal 2.0

@ClareRodway @Louise-Restell Uzi 9mm would be my suggest ;) rather than punches

18 May

***

A story that shocked us all this week
was Justice Secretary Ken Clarke's incredible PR gaff discussing the concept of rape sentence reductions for early guilty pleas on BBC Radio 5 Live.  Impossible position to defend, trying to describe a supposed line between serious and non-serious rape. What with the Strauss-Kahn fiasco in the same week and the Berlusconi trial coming up.  Judging by these astonishing attitudes to women crawling out of the woodwork, from educated men who should know better, I did wonder at one point this week whether I had suddenly been transported back to the pre-1970s.  All quite depressing really...

* * *

Super injunctions continue to dominate our headlines.  A new aspect each day - not least today's publication of the Neuberger Report - but even so it's astonishing the media hasn't bored of this topic yet.  Could it be because it's press freedom that lies at the heart of the debate?  Or is it more the fact that talking about superinjunctions is a far more pallatable way to present salacious stories about celebrity affairs and other peccadilloes, to an audiences that wants to pretend it is above such things!

If you haven't caught the Neuberger Report yet, you can find links to some excellent Guardian material on it here.

If you're after something more light-hearted about the role of social media in litigation, thought you might enjoy this (courtesy of @ChristianUncut via twitter)...

Jonathan Frewin

Chatted with the BBC’s Jonathan Frewin over  coffee at The Hospital Club this week.  Jonathan has worked for six years as a business features editor at the BBC’s World Service, but is currently setting up the Beeb’s business and economics social media platform.

Interesting to hear how he uses twitter and Facebook not just to push out news and stories, but to ask audience members what they would like the Beeb’s radio and TV interviewers to ask certain guests.  Apparently this is a popular value-add of BBC Business’s social media platforms from the audience’s point of view. 

Jonathan described an interview last month with Tesco’s CEO Philip Clarke.  The business Facebook page and Twitter feed invited questions from viewers to put to Clarke; the interviewer posed several of these to him; the best were included in the final cut of the website interview; and the full list of Facebook and twitter questions remains on the internet.  Interactivity with the audience on a totally new level.

Of course the most exciting breaking news that Jonathan shared with me is his excitement over the imminent arrival of his first baby, due any day now.  Congratulations!

***

The Apprentice returned to our screens this week and The Lawyer magazine had the brilliant idea to invite twitter-literate employment lawyers to tweet live from their sofas during the show.  Excellent fun!  Our client Rachel Harfield of Russell Jones & Walker’s Cardiff office is relatively new to twitter, but she lapped up the challenge and thoroughly enjoyed herself, tweeting under the hashtag #lawyerapprentice.  She raised more than a smile or two as I read her tweets appearing on my laptop screen, watching the programme on Tuesday and Wednesday evening.  Not only was she speedy in pinpointing the legal issues...

rjw_rachel 

Rachel Harfield

#lawyerapprentice  boys' slang app - place your bets how many of the protected characteristics are they going to offend?

                11 May

...but she also had a real nose for the issues that the non-legal world was focussing on:

 rjw_rachel 

Rachel Harfield

#lawyerapprentice  can any one explain the purpose of the black gloves?

 11 May

(Did you see Daira O Briain’s pair in the aftershow?)

She also wrote a blog on the subject, asking whether the producers’ decision to switch the prize from a job to a £250,000 investment and partnership in a new business was a deliberate attempt to avoid Britain’s-Got-Talent-style discrimination claims.

The Lawyer joined in the conversation on both evenings, retweeted the best of the tweets (and the blogs) and used them in their own Apprentice blog.  

The drama continues over the next 10 or so weeks.  Tune in and log on 9pm on Wednesdays.

***

Loved the story this week of the 12-year-old boy who wore his sister’s skirt to school in protest at the school’s ban on shorts, even in hot weather.  They couldn’t stop him from a wearing a skirt, as that would have been discriminatory – and he used this loophole to make a point. He says that insisting boys wear long trousers throughout the summer can adversely affect their concentration in the classroom and their ability to learn. 

Impressed as I am at this young man’s ingenuity and courage, as I tweeted at the time I have to say that my two boys would think wearing a SKIRT to school would affect their concentration in the classroom!

See this brave young man interviewed on CBBC News Round.

Linda Cheung

Such a pleasure to meet Linda Cheung, CEO of Connectegrity for tea at the IOD and hear the story of the launch of this new business.  Linda is a well-established member of the legal twitterati (click here to follow her on twitter) and is soon to launch an innovative new software product to help law firms get the most out of their social media activity.  However, she started life on the other side of the table, regularly instructing magic circle firms as a special projects manager at Morgan Stanley.

Linda told me the story of how working on the launch of Morgan Stanley's first ever credit card gave her a taste for managing projects centred on evolving markets and 'change'.  Numerous other 'transformative' projects followed at the bank, before she decided to step out and apply those skills to a sector in desparate need of innovation: the legal profession.  

She describes her excitement preparing to attend her first legal IT conference at the start of last year, an event focussed on the Legal Services Act and how it would fundamentally change the market for legal services, forever.  She looked forward to discussing the challenges of change and innovation with legal businessmen and women, and exchanging ideas about how to turn that challenge to advantage.  Imagine her surprise and disappointment when the typical response of the day was "Oh I don't really think the Legal Services Act will affect me.  We're not in that part of the market."  Sorry?  Exactly which part of the market isn't going to be affected by this seismic change?  A rude awakening to the world of legal business!

At tea this week though, we both agreed that awareness within the profession has changed dramatically since then.  Today firms have a much better grasp of what the Act means for their business, in terms of both threat and opportunity.  It may not be obvious precisely how the Act is going to affect some firms, but management teams throughout the profession understand that keeping a watching brief is essential.

* * *

What a week for news! - at the weekend we were still celebrating the sublime of the Royal Wedding, but by Monday we had moved on to the macabre spectacle of the Bin Laden shooting.  And who would have thought that the ruling on the 7/7 bombing inquest would take place against the backdrop of Bin Laden's recent death. Clifford Tibber of Anthony Gold solicitors, representing seven bereaved families at the inquest, writes here in The Times of the emotional as well as legal and logistical challenges of managing the case.  Quite an insight into what it means to take on a case with such emotional charge. 

* * *

I just love being a fair weather cyclist!  As my twitter chums may have spotted, I have recently become a fan of the Transport for London Cycle Hire Scheme: total permission to cycle to work in the sunshine, then decide to tube it home if you just don't feel like the exercise at the end of a busy day, or because the weather is a bit cloudy. And it's so cheap!  Brilliant!!