Blawg Review #290

Welcome to Blawg Review #290 which hails this week from Blighty, where we offer a warm welcome to the libel tourist and the would-be-wealthy divorcee alike. In a week of exploding aircraft and travel chaos there has been much said on twitter (#twitterjoketrial and #iamspartacus) and across the blawgosphere about the conviction of Paul Chambers [...]

Social Media As Evidence

Most often experienced in family law in all its excruciating banality in the form of facebook mudslinging between exes, this post from Justin McShane reminds us that what we post online can be incriminating in oh so many ways. Be careful what you post. It may just come back to haunt you…Being tagged by a [...]

Legal Costs

Short piece on ‘Today’ on Tues morning about costs in civil cases. I switched on as a clip of Lord Justice Judge opining about the state of civil justice was part way through. Evan Davis moved onto an interview with Bridget Prentice. Oh goody, I thought as I drove to court, something relevant to my line of [...]

Behind Closed Doors – Judicial Shenanigans

The Guardian has lost in it’s attempt to secure details of the identities of Judges found guilty of misconduct or who have been reprimanded. I think maybe I’m missing something because my response to this was a bemused ‘hunh?’. . The Information Tribunal making the decision apparently cited the example of a very senior judge who [...]

Top 100 Most Pointless Lists

The Times has published a list of the top 100 ‘most powerful lawyers’ here. What a stupidly vague and pointless piece of space filling that was. Must have been a slow legal news day or something. It’s not even what it purports to be, since famous / notorious / good at working the media / working in [...]

Beta That

@kevinokeefe has been tweeting about this new tool: www.lexisweb.com – currently in beta and hence free, for the time being. Have yet to seriously play with it but it is another weapon in the arsenal of information management / search tools. this however is not the primary focus of blogging discussion about the ‘BIG, BAD’ Lexis Nexis [...]

open justice

The Guardian reports that a newspaper is appealing a decision to allow the identity of a man convicted of child pornography offences to remain anonymous in order to protect his daughters from possible bullying. The Court of Appeal will consider this matter, unusually with a five Judge panel – no doubt because of the public interest in the [...]

i’m going to eat worms

Call me naive but I hadn’t appreciated just how many people hate lawyers. more specifically barristers. More specifically family barristers. I mean I knew we weren’t all that popular (not helped by stupid headlines about ‘fat cat legal aid lawyers’ etc). And I knew a lot of people (most of my friends included) are pretty clueless [...]

changes to family assistance orders

from oct 1 amendments to s16 of Children Act 1989 (re: Family Assistance Orders) come into force, and the court will be able to make a family assistance order for up to 12 months duration, and the old requirement that there must be exceptional circumstances for such an order to be made is repealed. This is [...]

North v North

Gonna be published in the Family Law Newsweek weekly email bulletin next Monday….Excellent resource. Talented writers etc etc…check it out. PS North v North  is a case about a wife who got a divorce settlement in 1981 and came back for more in 2004, having lost a sizeable portion of her settlement through her own [...]