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Tonight's meeting of the BPP Legal Awareness Society: the Facebook IPO
After an introduction to the importance of the IPO in corporate finance, and where the IPO is likely to feature in the legal curriculum, we discussed this evening how social media sites have been involved in initial public offerings. Specifically, we considered the media reaction to the IPO of Facebook earlier this year. The meeting was well attended, and members of the BPP Legal Awareness Society were reminded to read about the legal aspects of the flotation/IPO prior to mentioning it on any application form for training contracts or vacation scheme placements.
The handout of the presentation is here: Facebook IPO.
Younger students like the 'In search of the elusive training contract' page on Facebook
The ‘In Search of the elusive training contract’ Facebook page is here.
It was introduced a month ago. Its intention was to provide a hub for anyone to discuss their experiences of the training contract search. It doesn’t have any training provider affiliation – anyone doing the LPC at any training provider is most welcome to join, especially!
The ‘insights’ back-end page on Facebook produces revealing demographics.
Interestingly, the group is most popular in females aged between 18-24. There are currently 49 users, from 5 countries:
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39
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United Kingdom
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2
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United States of America
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1
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Luxembourg
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1
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Cyprus
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1
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Hong Kong
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Join the BPP Legal Awareness Society Management Committee – Freshers Fair 2011
Today, on 28 September 2011, the BPP Legal Awareness Society will have a stall at the BPP London Freshers’ Fair 2011. The Fair runs from 1400 to 1800 (with refreshments thereafter until 2000).
The BPP Legal Awareness Society has a mission statement of promoting the importance of commercial and contract law to business, and the importance of commercial clients to commercial and corporate law.
Joining our Society particularly as a member of Teams A or B is a great way to demonstrate a commitment to teamwork or commercial awareness for training contract application form for commercial/corporate law firms.
Whilst based in London, we are hoping that you may be interested if you study at other BPP campuses. Our physical meetings this year will take place in the BPP Business School at St Mary Axe (London) and the BPP Law School (London). They will especially be of interest to GDL, LPC, LLM, MBA and other Master students in accountacy or tax particularly.
Our meetings for next term are outlined in the following link.
We are seeking to appoint members of the following teams.
Team A People to contribute to writing copy about legal news/law firms/education/other topics of interest for this blog http://www.legal-aware.org.
Our blog has a wide readership, including senior legal academics, legal practitioners, journalists specialising in legal education and/or new, educators and member of the legal tweeting/blogging community.
Writing news stories is a superb way of improving your written communication skills, and for keeping up-to-date about news from legal education or law firms. Here’s one from yesterday on the fringe event run by @SoundOffJustice at the Labour Conference in Liverpool 2011.
We produce our own educational videos on key topics in corporate law. There are currently 14 of them. The narration is done by the current BBC1 continuity presenter. Here’s one on climate change and the law. Law students have found the videos very useful for enhancing ‘commercial awareness’ for the general education and/or training contract interviews.
We do not require help with our twitter thread http://twitter.com/legalaware, although our Twitter feed is currently very popular (with 1800 followers). Interacting on our thread is a good way to meet people involved in law and business.
Team B People to help writing verbal reasoning questions for our new online facility to help people train for the SHL Direct verbal reasoning tests. The Legal Awareness Society, run by students of BPP, are operating this initiative under the name ‘Legal Recruit).
We will be inviting people to attend a training session on doing and setting these questions in October 2011. A team of volunteers will help us write the questions; taking part will give you free practice, and to help you understand how these tests work.
Team C Joining as an ‘ordinary’ member of the Society. The Society is open to all student members of BPP. A lot of our activities are online through Twitter and our blog. To join the Society, all you need to do is to navigate through the ‘Community’ tab in Blackboard.
The user of Twitter by the law twitterati : lessons for @legalaware
This is the @legalaware twitter profile page:
The Intendance report published in December 2010 gives an overview of how law firms should use Twitter.
http://www.intendance.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Intendance-Twitter-Report.pdf
It is interesting to see whether the LegalAware profile page lives up to the suggestions of Intendance. Indeed, Intendance recommends that simple changes like having a bespoke background, firm logo, and a suitable account name all help to make the page look professional. Apparently, such features make Twitter output an authentic identity, helping to attract followers and giving your tweets greater “credibility”.
We have a picture logo to represent the BPP Legal Awareness Society, although we haven’t undergone any formal branding process. The website link is to our website (http://legal-aware.org), and our background is a simple one in keeping with our new found ‘corporate identity’.
I use Twitter as a channel for promoting legal blogs, podcasts, press releases, newsletters, videos and any other legal content. Some of the blogs I would like to feature include:
http://copyright4education.blogspot.com/ (this is, as such, not a legal blog, but contains an excellent range of in-depth copyright issues, particularly relevant to education)
http://charonqc.wordpress.com/
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen-green
http://legalbizzle.wordpress.com/
http://www.clerkingwell.co.uk/
http://ukhumanrightsblog.com/ (Adam Wagner)
http://nipclaw.wordpress.com’ (Jane Lambert; useful advice for start-ups)
http://www.shireensmith.com/ (this is a lovely blog by Shireen which has a focus on copyright, trade marks and brand management)
I like to follow relevant people in the legal industry such as journalists, ‘blawgers’, in-house counsel, solicitors, recruiters, legal commentators, to raise the profile of our initiative at BPP (the Legal Awareness Society), and to encourage an interesting conversation between people of very different backgrounds. However, in the case of the BPP Legal Awareness Society, whilst we hope to cover all practice seats of large corporate law firms fairly, there tends to be a bias towards social media, cloud computing, human rights and reputation management tweets, because of the nature of population actively tweeting at the moment.
On our new blog (about to be launched), there is a Twitter button on our LegalAware blog, connecting to Twitter, and a Facebook one, connecting to our new page on Facebook. The Intendance survey of the top 50 UK law firms found that Twitter use can generally be split into three key areas:
- No Twitter account found for the firm
- Incomplete Twitter account – unclear if owned by the firm
- Complete Twitter account with varying levels of interaction
Remarkably, it appears that number of firms lack a clear, branded presence, which confuses potential followers – and Intendance considers that this reflects badly on the firm. Quality of tweets is another area of contention, and worryingly analysis of the output across these firms shows that a majority post updates that fail to spark debate. Instead, tweets tend to be summaries of press releases or news articles with links straight to the news page on the main website. Intendance advises that “this sort of content lacks the social element thatwill attract more followers.”
Finally, there is no doubt that Intendance considers that the social element is crucial:
“Social content helps to cement relationships – the human empathy and shared interest factor – but valuable information is what will ultimately make or break Twitter in the B2B sector, not meaningless gossip. .. The ultimate aim, in a similar way to a website, is to achieve a reputation as a credible source of legal knowhow, both on a personal level and a firm-wide level.”
Hugh's Fish Fight
HUGH’S EXPERIENCE
“For the past few months, I have been travelling around the UK meeting fishermen, marine conservationists, politicians, supermarkets bosses, and of course fish-eating members of the public,” says Hugh.“My experience, and how it has changed the way I think about fish are shown in Hugh’s Fish Fight (broadcast 11th, 12th, 13th January 2011) as part of Channel 4’s Big Fish Fight.
Watch all three programmes on 4oD.
“This season featuring programmes from fellow chefs Gordon Ramsay, Heston Blumenthal and Jamie Oliver, aims to champion sustainable seafood and celebrate lesser known delicacies of the deep.
“This website, fishfight.net is the campaign hub accompanying Hugh’s Fish Fight and will be continuing its work over the coming months. Here you can find out more about the issues raised in Hugh’s Fish Fight and lend your support to the campaign. You can also follow the progress of Hugh’s Fish Fight on Facebook and Twitter.
“Hugh’s Fish Fight is supported by a wide coalition of environmental Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and, we hope, by a growing number of fishermen and policy makers too. A vital part of the campaign, and the area where we are currently looking for public support, is the issue of discards at sea.”
DISCARDS AT SEA
Around half of the fish caught by fishermen in the North Sea are unnecessarily thrown back into the ocean dead.
The problem is that in a mixed fishery where many different fish live together, fishermen cannot control the species that they catch.
Fishing for one species often means catching another, and if people don’t want them or fishermen are not allowed to land them, the only option is to throw them overboard. The vast majority of these discarded fish will die.
Because discards are not monitored, it is difficult to know exactly how many fish are being thrown away. The EU estimates that in the North Sea, discards are between 40% and 60% of the total catch. Many of these fish are species that have fallen out of fashion: we can help to prevent their discard just by rediscovering our taste for them.
Others are prime cod, haddock, plaice and other popular food species that are “over-quota”. The quota system is intended to protect fish stocks by setting limits on how many fish of a certain species should be caught.
Fishermen are not allowed to land any over-quota fish; if they accidentally catch them – which they can’t help but do – there is no choice but to throw them overboard before they reach the docks.
THE SOLUTIONS
We need to diversify our fish eating habits, and we need to change policy so that it works for fish, fishermen and consumers.
The Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), which is the political framework for the quota system, is currently being reformed for 2012. Scientists and environmental groups have suggested a number of ways that that the policy can work to protect fish stocks. Some details of these can be found on our solutions page.
Re-writing the Common Fisheries Policy is going to be an enormously complicated business, and unfortunately there is no one easy solution to ending discards. Many people agree that the answer will lie in a combination of different ideas and policies.
WHAT CAN YOU DO?
• Sign up to the campaign on the sign up page. You will be writing directly to policy makers in Europe to let them know that the unnecessary and unethical discarding of perfectly good fish must stop. We can make a difference. If enough people sign up to the campaign, they have to listen to us. We aim to get 250,000 signatures by summer 2011.
• Write to your MP to ask them to support the Fish Fight Early Day Motion.
• Expand the selection of fish that you eat by trying some of the lesser-known species of local fish currently being discarded as trash. In the UK, cod, salmon and tuna account for more than 50% of the fish that we consume, and tasty, exciting and nutritious fish such as flounder, dab, coley and pouting are overlooked and thrown away.
• Spread the word, tell all of your friends and family about Hugh’s Fish Fight and get them to sign the campaign too.
Together we can stop this ridiculous carnage. Join Hugh’s Fish Fight now!
Thanks very much,
Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall
(C) Hugh’s Fish Fight 2011 http://www.fishfight.net/the-campaign/
Christina Zaba's Top 15 writers
You’ve probably all seen the game on Facebook. Christina Zaba, whose journalism first came to my attention through her writings on data protection (see example here), took part in this game.
The game goes as follows:
Here’s a nice game if you’re inclined to play for a few moments. Don’t take too long to think about it. List fifteen authors (poets included) who’ve influenced you and who will always remain with you. List the first fifteen that spring to mind in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag at least fifteen friends, including me. This is the first facebook “game” I’ve taken part in, because I’m really curious to see which authors people consider to have been personally important to them. (To do this, go to your Notes tab on your profile page, paste these rules in a new note, cast your fifteen picks, and tag people under Tags below the note.) Thanks for playing.
William Shakespeare
Emily Bronte
Scott Fitzgerald
Joseph Conrad
Anna Sewell
TS Eliot
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
JRR Tolkien
Thomas Malory
John Donne
William Blake
Alan Garner
Emily Dickinson
Germaine Greer
William Golding
Social media and I
I set up ‘Law and Medicine’ as an educational project, as I have nearly 7 degrees in law and medicine. However, as a disabled academic, I believe that these issues should be accessible to all, hence I wish to maintain this blog. For further information about my motivation for doing so, please refer to the following websites.
The Law and Medicine blog
Personal blog 1
Personal blog 2
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Curriculum vitae
Discussion network
Oh yes, I support Labour, and I think our new leader is wonderful!
Dr Shibley Rahman, Director of Law and Medicine
QS BA MA MB BChir PhD MRCP(UK) LLB(Hons)
