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The Corporate Client Project – now receiving applications
The corporate client project for students
We are currently looking for law or business students with an interest in commercial or corporate law to give mini-presentations on the corporate strategy of their choice.
This might be a real client of a firm engaged by a firm after his or her training contract, or a real client which is genuinely otherwise of interest to the law or business student.
If you know of anyone who might be interested in this new innovative project, please feel free to forward this email to him or her.
There is no application process to take part, save to say the applicant should be genuinely motivated about explaining the relevance of corporate strategy to people in the commercial or corporate law disciplines, at whatever level.
Please respond by emailing this account as soon as possible, legalaware1213@gmail.com stating who you and what course you are studying, or have studied, or will study, with BPP.
If you are at a loss in thinking about a suitable client, or a suitable area of client, you might find it interesting to watch our short presentations on the ‘LegalAware’ website.
They are to be found as follows:
Corporate social responsibility
To provide inspiration, you may be particularly interested in the FT, the Economist, Legal Week, or Lawyer 2 Be.
Best of luck! Law firms are particularly interested in those trainees who are very knowledgeable about the economic, business or financial climate around them; and graduate recruitment partners and their colleagues look for ‘commercial awareness’ amongst a plethora of other competences.
THE LINK TO OUR OFFICIAL PAGE ON THE BPP STUDENTS SITE IS HERE (AT THE END OF THIS PAGE, YOU CAN JOIN THE SOCIETY, IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY DONE SO.)
BPP Legal Awareness Society
BPP Law School, Holborn
24 October 2012
Flier: Corporate Client Project
Integrated care – there’s an app for that! A hypothetical case study.
Innovation and integrated care
Andrew Neil reminded us this morning on ‘The Sunday Politics’ that there are currently around 4 million individuals who don’t have access to the internet. Prof Michael Porter, chair of strategy at the Harvard Business School, has for a long time reminded us that sectors which have competitive advantage are not necessarily those which are cutting-edge technologically, but his colleague Prof Clay Christensen, chair of innovation at the same institution, has been seminal in introducing the concept of ‘disruptive innovation’. An introduction to this area is here. The central theory of Christensen’s work is the dichotomy of sustaining and disruptive innovation. A sustaining innovation hardly results in the downfall of established companies because it improves the performance of existing products along the dimensions that mainstream customers value. Disruptive innovation, on the other hand, will often have characteristics that traditional customer segments may not want, at least initially. Such innovations will appear as cheaper, simpler and even with inferior quality if compared to existing products, but some marginal or new segment will value it. (more…)
Integrated care – there's an app for that! A hypothetical case study.
Innovation and integrated care
Andrew Neil reminded us this morning on ‘The Sunday Politics’ that there are currently around 4 million individuals who don’t have access to the internet. Prof Michael Porter, chair of strategy at the Harvard Business School, has for a long time reminded us that sectors which have competitive advantage are not necessarily those which are cutting-edge technologically, but his colleague Prof Clay Christensen, chair of innovation at the same institution, has been seminal in introducing the concept of ‘disruptive innovation’. An introduction to this area is here. The central theory of Christensen’s work is the dichotomy of sustaining and disruptive innovation. A sustaining innovation hardly results in the downfall of established companies because it improves the performance of existing products along the dimensions that mainstream customers value. Disruptive innovation, on the other hand, will often have characteristics that traditional customer segments may not want, at least initially. Such innovations will appear as cheaper, simpler and even with inferior quality if compared to existing products, but some marginal or new segment will value it.
A consortium, led by Frontier Economics, and including The King’s Fund, The Nuffield Trust and Ernst & Young, was appointed by Monitor to consider issues relating to the delivery of integrated care. Their report is here. Under the Health and Social Care Act Monitor has a duty to “enable” integrated healthcare and integrated health and social care. “Integrated care” is a concept that has been defined in many different ways. A recent review of the literature on integrated care by Armitage et al. (2009) revealed some 175 definitions and concepts. There is now a clear consensus that successful integrated care is primarily about patient experience, although all dimensions of quality and cost-effectiveness are relevant. A definition of integrated care that combines the experiential dimension with that of cost and quality means there are potential benefits from integrated care for current and future service users, the public, providers and commissioners. This means that a working definition of integrated care may be around the smoothness with which a patient or their representatives or carers can navigate the NHS and social care systems in order to meet their needs.
According to the International Longevity Centre – UK, the current (non-integrated) health and social care system has several failures. They include:
- Lack of ‘ownership’ for the patient and her problems, so that information gets lost as she navigates the system
- Lack of involvement by the user/patient in the management and strategy of care
- Poor communication with the user/patient as well as between health and social care providers
- Treating service users for one condition without recognising other needs or conditions, thereby undermining the overall effectiveness of treatment
- Decisions made in the social care setting affect the impact of health care treatment, and vice versa
At the heart of this new model of care is the need to better integrate services between providers around the individual needs of patients and service users. As The King’s Fund’s review of the evidence for integrated care concluded, significant benefits might potentially arise from the integration of services (Curry and Ham 2010), particularly when these are targeted at those client groups for whom care is currently poorly co-ordinated. In the NHS, integrated care could be particularly important in meeting the needs of people with chronic diseases like diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; frail older people who may have several chronic diseases and be in contact with a range of health and social care professionals; and people using specialist services – for example, those involved in respiratory, cardiac and cancer care – where networks linking hospitals that provide these services have contributed to improved outcomes. In some cases integration may even entail bringing together responsibility for commissioning and provision. This form of integration is important because it allows clinicians to use budgets either to provide services more directly or to commission these services from others through ‘make or buy’ decisions. The critical ingredients of integrated care are considered to be: defining the right populations, aligning the right financial incentives to support a variety of diverse healthcare providers (but primarily to ensure the highest quality in patient overall experience), improved accountability for better performance in a more coherent outcome of coordinated care, judicious use of information technology and other knowledge management resources, effective leadership, a collaborative (and competitive where appropriate) culture, patient engagement, and better and more appropriate use of resources according to multi-disciplinary relevance.
In this hypothetical innovation described below, patients, members of CCGs, and healthcare providers have access to a smartphone app called “Integrated care”.
Who is the end user?
A problem with integrated care is that it is likely that the same organisational structures would still exist – albeit with key agents, such as health care provider organisations, healthcare professionals including doctors, clinical commissioning groups representatives, and so on, but a better way of looking at this innovation is where all participants are members of a continuous ‘network’ of innovation; this would help to diminish perception of there being a hierarchy in healthcare, which is a source of considerable inertia in the current English NHS. A version of the app could be available to clinical commissioning group members, or directly to the patient, and of course data are shared with healthcare providers.
The advantage about giving the app directly to the patient would be that the patient himself or herself makes a decision about the care, based on up-to-date information about cost and quality of care (it would be necessary to ensure that accurate data are submitted). The main procedural problem is deciding how much money each person has to play with in a personalised budget – would it be higher or indeed without limit for an individual with multidisciplinary needs or lives a long way from their place of treatment? Indeed, should the budgets be limitless, or should there be some form of rationing in keeping with the finite resources provided by the English economy? Notwithstanding these massive issues, this app would be more in keeping of what the general public understands by “money following the patient”.
Rationale for an app
This app could be based around diseases or conditions, such as dementia, systemic lupus erythematosus, and diabetes, which very often affect more than one bodily system, or more than discipline (for example nurses, doctors, dieticians, physiotherapists, SALT experts). The Department of Health initiated a two-year national programme of pilots to investigate the impact of providing integrated care. The national programme consisted of 16 specific initiatives, including: structured care for dementia, end-of-life care, older people at risk of admissions, long term conditions, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, care for diabetes, and substance misuse.
The Kings Fund/Nuffield Trust Report has emphasised the potential value of an innovation-approach to this problem. They felt a need to allow innovations in integrated care time to embed locally, requiring longer planning cycles. For this innovation change to succeed, providers should be allowed to take on financial risks and innovate as approaches to integrated care often work best when some of the responsibilities for commissioning services are given to those who deliver care. They also set out a more nuanced interpretation of patient choice. Patient choice should be intrinsic to the provision of integrated care, however, it could also be a barrier to integrated care.
It would be hard to see such an app being truly automated, in that it would be inconceivable to think of an individual making a decision about integrated care without help of an appropriate expert. However, having an app supported on the cloud has its advantages. Notwithstanding the usual privacy and security issues (which exist even with online shopping with supermarkets), resources could be scaled according to the needs of the population, and the transfer of information freely across all parts of the network would be virtually instantaneous.
Barriers to integration which the app would seek to overcome:
- Quality of IT and communication system: having separate information systems with different formats for clinical documents and without a common access to service users’ information makes integrated care more difficult (i.e. inter-operability); apps are commonplace on a variety of media including Apple iphones and Google Android phones, and for example different operating systems?
- Risk aversion: health professionals often work under heavy responsibilities and may be over-cautious e.g. when transferring their patients to another organisation, or collaborating with other providers; using an app might itself might be symbolic of embracing a different cultural approach to the more cumbersome (and slower) paper handling of integrative healthcare administration?
- Service users choosing alternative providers: service users have freedom of choice regarding their elected place of care. However, this freedom can create deviations from the planned pathway of care and may cut across attempts to provide integrated care. Regulation has a critical rôle here, if the definition of ‘any qualified provider’ allows as many regulated healthcare providers to enter into a competitive market.
There are still problems that the app would have difficulty in overcoming, namely:
- Governance: it may be unclear who has ultimate clinical and/or organisational responsibility should anything go wrong. That may make individuals reluctant to discharge patients from their care into that of another clinician.
- Clinical practice: differences in how to treat patients between different institutions can mean a lack of consensus and unwillingness to transfer patients from one part of the system to another.
- Cultural differences: driven by some of the issues above but even also by management style, extent of delegation of authority, clarity over objectives and other factors that might affect willingness to share information, resources and service users.
Nonetheless, there are possible advantages of the app:
- Having structured relationships between service providers and with patients – co-location, case management, multidisciplinary teams and assigning patients to a particular primary health care provider
- Using structured arrangements for coordinating service provision between providers – coordinated or joint consultation, shared assessments, and arrangements for priority access to another service
- Using systems to support care coordination – care plans, shared decision support, patient-held or shared records, shared information or communication systems, and a register of patients
- Improving communication between service providers – electronic transfer of data could be facilitated through instant messaging, or audio/video conferencing (like Skype)
- Providing support for patients – access to the most-up-to-date information about the condition, and healthcare providers.
Advantages of integrated care
Integrated Care should improve quality of health care. Quality can have several dimensions and interpretations. However, according to the evidence that we have reviewed, integrated care should improve quality based on four types of benefits:
- Patient experience: according to the NHS Confederation, improving patient experience as a whole is complex. It involves looking at every aspect of how care is delivered, including how the patient comes into contact with the ‘health system’ in the first place.
- Clinical outcome: based on Frommer et al. (1992), a clinical outcome is the “change in the health of an individual, group of people or population which is attributable to an intervention or series of interventions”. It could include lower admission and readmission rates, shorter hospital stay, reduction in the use of hospital beds, shorter recovery periods, etc.
- Patient safety: the Department of Health’s report on patient safety states that healthcare relies on a range of complex interactions between people, skills, technologies and drugs. Sometimes things can – and do – go wrong. While progress has been made, patient safety is not always given the same priority or status as other major issues such as reducing waiting times, implementing national service frameworks and achieving financial balance.
- Cost efficiency: reducing the overall cost of health-related concerns is complicated by defining the scope of such concerns and the extent to which prevention, actual treatment and post-treatment recovery, rehabilitation and re-integration and ongoing support are included in the calculation of costs.
The author is well aware that there are many operational and strategic issues with the implementation of such an app, but the purpose of this article is simply to introduce some basic concepts of integrated healthcare.
Is the future of legal education online?
An impression that the debate in delivering online legal education is fast gathering pace is a genuine one. Alex Aldridge reported in the Guardian last week that Peter Crisp, Chief Executive of BPP, had opined at a major conference about the merits of “online only solicitor training”: “More flexible learning options allowing students to “work while they study”, according to BPP Law School chief executive Peter Crisp, who was critical of the legal regulators’ refusal to allow his organisation to deliver online only solicitor training.”
On 17 July 2012, it was reported that Edinburgh University had become the first UK university to sign up to a major influential US online delivery project of education. The investment in this project has been substantial; for example, elsewhere it is reported that: “Adding to Coursera’s success are UPenn and Caltech combined investment of $3.7 million in the company. With additional investment from current investors New Enterprise Associates and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the company now totals over $22 million in funding.”
Educators tend to wish to go off the record about their views, which makes debating this much harder. One lecturer at BPP that I know remarked, “Truth told, I’m still mired in old-world teaching and techniques. The classroom sessions I deliver are very traditional”. Yet, another lecturer at BPP whom I know well too commented, “Be careful what you try to destroy. Education is very personal. One size doesn’t fit all.” In response to this, Jon Harman, Director of Learning Design and Media at the College of Law responded, “one size doesn’t fit all yet we keep insisting on it in formal education.”
The Legal Practice Course (LPC) as currently set, across most institutions and centres, is delivered as a ‘standard product’. This means that it has a highly rigorous specification, and the learning objectives and assessment criteria for each part of it are clearly specified. I appreciate how this is organised, from having had an OFQUAL/QCF course approved myself in fact. These can be aligned transparently with the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) document for key objectives for the LPC which is available on their website. However, when it comes to the issue of face-to-face teaching and learning, the SRA is in fact very precise. According to clause 3.50 of the ‘LPC Information Pack’ (available here), “A face-to-face requirement has been set to ensure there are opportunities for all students to interact with each other and with tutors and to develop together their professional skills, attitudes and behaviours.”
As a student, I fully agree with this. Being a bit banal about it, BPP is ‘preparing you to practice’, not ‘preparing you to sit at one of a computer terminal to meet assessment objectives’. Teamwork and communication are highly sought-after competences in corporate law firms, and your ability to communicate articulately with colleagues and explain your ideas must be a key attribute of trainees. However, I remember once asking a partner at Freshfields how much international corporate law is done online, and he explained, characteristically openly, “an awful lot”. So the component of international corporate law which is being done online is growing itself, one suspects.
I learnt a lot about innovation management in my MBA, and this is a specific sector within business which decades of experience in other sectors of business might not match. I graduate in November, having completed this course successfully at BPP Business School earlier this year. With an ‘innovation hat on’, having done a full course with my tutor Dr Vidal Kumar (@VidalAndreas) which I loved, we were taught about the importance of culturing a wider network through key participants of a network, such as the Coursera network involving Stanford, Michigan, Lausanne and Princeton above; about having some ‘key adopters’ such as A-star universities, the operational issues which might limit or facilitate its success (e.g. fast technological infrastructure, clusters of innovation), but most importantly how you could secure competitive advantage through your business model through innovation. Crucially – and most fundamentally – you need to understand what an innovation is. An innovation is more than an invention – it has to be a dialogue between the person who created it, and its purpose, and its intended recipient. That is why it’s going to be interesting to see whether Menshn ‘takes off’. Innovation is not necessarily about improving on design specifications, in the spirit of the famous Henry Ford saying, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse'”. Likewise, producing an e-book is not the same as digitising a ‘conventional’ book.
This aspect is the heart of the issue. Democratising education is incredible, in that your outreach of the audience is of a different scale, but it means that you can offer online courses to the world. Many do not pass such courses because of the high attrition rate. Providers need to be able to ensure that such courses are not offered just because they are cheap, and indeed that the concepts of ‘cheap’ and ‘low price’ are not conflated with ‘cheap and nasty’. I believe online education can work, if supported by other means (such as the fact that students are individually supported by a real-life teacher so that there is regular monitoring of the learning experience which may not necessarily be the same as the assessment objectives). I first went up to Cambridge in 1993, so this is now my 18th year in higher education of some sort (some of which has not been on full-time or part-time courses), so I have much experience as an ‘end user’.
But the question must become also: what’s in it for the law school? By offering so many courses so cheaply, it is hard to see where the profit comes from, unless the inward investment comes from private equity or venture capital; but even then the private equity and venture capital firms need to consider carefully how sustainable the investment is, and in simple terms what the return-on-investment is? For example, the social media have been notorious in monetising their innovations; even possibly the chief strategy of making a profit from innovation, the initial public offering, has turned sour for Facebook.
This is a very complicated debate, but one which I will be sure to follow even though I will be leaving legal education for good in two months time, having done my LLM, LPC and MBA.
Talk this evening 6.15pm @BPPLawSchool Holborn on innovation implementation in technology
This evening, I will be giving a presentation in room 2.6 here in the BPP Law School, Holborn, on disputes involving Apple, Samsung and HTC involving tablets and smartphones.
The learning objectives of this talk are as follows:
- To give an overview of two disputes in intellectual property between multi-national parties in the technology sector.
- To contextualise the importance of two intellectual property rights (patents and design rights) in how multinational companies create ‘competitive advantage’.
- To improve the “commercial awareness” of applicants for training contracts this summer.
I wished to give an explanation of how multi-national companies involved in technology use innovation to create competitive advantage to generate profit, but look at it from the perspective of the industry of intellectual property protection in the form of design rights (tablet) and patent (“slide-to-view” mechanism of smartphones).
The handout for this talk is here.
Students on the LPC might find the talk interesting as these intellectual property rights have been introduced on the Legal Practice Course special elective on commercial law and intellectual property. The subject-matter is also a valid topic for a recent interesting example of ‘commercial news’, which might be aired in the training contract application form or in the interview itself.
A “calico” – all will be revealed….
Organisational dementia in the NHS?
The definition of ‘dementia’ in neurology has experienced a number of different iterations in recent years. This has been a direct result of physicians developing a growing awareness that Alzheimer’s Disease, although the most common form of dementia in the senile age group, is not the only form of dementia. In fact, there are about 200 different types of dementia at least. This means that dementia is not always typified by loss of memory, the so-called amnestic syndrome. However, in Alzheimer’s Disease, the most pervasive cognitive deficit is inability to learn new memories, whilst memory for previous events or people can be relatively well preserved consistent with that outstanding French physician from the Paris School, Ribot, in his famous 1881 treatise on memory. Frontal lobe dementia has been speculated to be the most common form of dementia in the pre-senile age-group, characterised instead by a profound change in behaviour and personality, rather a cognitive deficit of a strong amnestic flavour. The NHS is undergoing now, against the will of the medical Royal Colleges and the British Medical Association, a fundamental strategic change, and this tweet yesterday evening caught me eye. It seems to me that the term ‘organisational dementia‘ could be applied to this organisational change at a number of levels.
In organisational development, learning is a characteristic of an adaptive organization, i.e., an organisation that is able to sense changes in signals from its environment (both internal and external) and adapt accordingly. A central issue is how adaptable the culture of the NHS is in general – many would like to see the NHS to adopt a stronger innovation culture, and in fact the NHS Innovation and Change provides extremely useful guidance on how innovative change in the NHS can be implemented successfully. Helen Bevan from that unit points to Harold Sirkin and colleagues who have published a model in the Harvard Business Review. The reason Bevan likes this model is that it is based on evidence from more than 1,000 change initiatives globally. I view a failure to implement change in the NHS, for example as will be necessary following the implementation of the Health and Social Act, will be in part be due to a failure in organisational learning, what you could call an ‘organisational dementia’. Bevan, in her brief article, points to two critical factors where organisational change will be impossible to achieve, and this should very much be borne in mind as the Government, with the help of McKinseys, try to effect their change without stakeholder cooperation.
“There must be active, visible backing for the change from the most influential senior leaders. They say that if, as a senior leader, you feel you are talking up the change initiative at least three times as much as you need to, your organisation will feel you are backing the transformation. In addition, the change is unlikely to succeed if it is not enthusiastically supported by the people who will have to operate within the new structures and systems that it creates. Staff need to understand the reasons for the change and believe it is worthwhile. The final factor is effort. There is an NHS tendency to launch major improvement initiatives without taking account of the extra responsibilities for change projects on top of busy operational jobs. The authors assert that if anyone’s workload increases by more than ten per cent as a result of the initiative, it is likely to run into problems. Organisations need to calculate upfront how much extra time and effort will be required to execute the change and create the space for it to happen.”
A further interesting contribution to the ‘organisational learning’ research comes from Common (2004) who discusses the concept of organisational learning in a political environment to improve public policy-making. The author details the initial uncontroversial reception of organisational learning in the public sector and the development of the concept with the learning organisation. According to Common (2004), research in UK local government has centred around four powerful obstacles for organizational learning in the public sector: (1) overemphasis of the individual, (2) resistance to change and politics, (3) social learning is self-limiting, i.e. individualism, and (4) political “blame culture.” This could be responsible also for a type of organisational dementia in the NHS; resistance to change and ‘blame cultures’ are two particular potentially serious issues for the NHS.
So far, I have considered an ‘organisational dementia’ in the NHS where the dementia has an amnestic flavour. There could of course be relatively change in its capacity for learning or memory, but there could be a profound change in its behaviour and personality. As the NHS becomes increasingly privatised, where patient care is reconciled more-and-more with an obligation in law to maximise shareholder dividend, it may be that the personality of the NHS becomes unrecognisable in a few years’ time. This to me, and I suspect many others, would be very sad.
So, in conclusion, I have outlined how a label of ‘organisational dementia’ might be applied to the NHS using organisational learning defects as a basis of an argument, using Alzheimer’s disease as a corollary. I have also applied the term in the way akin to frontal dementia. Organisational learning is a very powerful notion in business management, and its critical application to the strategic change in the NHS has not gone unnoticed by me.
I'd quickly like to #Menshn something
First of all, to make any sense of #Menshn and/or this blogpost, I suggest you read this superb blogpost by @scrapperduncan.
Let’s face it, Menshn is hardly the easiest word to spell correctly. Actually, I spelt it incorrectly, expecting it to be Mensch-n after one of its creators, Louise Mensch. Luke Bozier, whom I actually like as a person, is the other co-creator. Googling it provides suboptimal PR for its creators, with an article entitled, “Why I won’t be using Menshn, and you shouldn’t either” by Bobbie Johnson coming very high on the search. Whoever programmed Menshn should be reminded that when creating the html you do not include a description advertising the faults of your product. This is how Menshn appears, albeit at No. 1, on Google:
This is, however, the worst PR gaffe on the homepage of Menshn, which would make Craig Oliver reach for his rag doll model of Norman Smith. For all the detoxification of the Conservative brand, this is perhaps an unhelpful contribution.
Do I think corporate lawyers will be rushing to launch an initial public offering for #Menshn? In a nutshell, no. Armed with my copy of the seminal textbook of Tidd and Bessant’s “Managing innovation: Integrating technological, market and organisational change” which we had to read for our MBA, I wished to see whether Menshn is likely to succeed as an “innovation”.
Almost by definition the only people who can determine the success of an innovation are its users. The platform has,to be likeable, and easy-to-use. I’ve now been reliably told by very many people who’ve used #Menshn that it is ‘very buggy’, and it was most unwise for #Menshn to have been launched if that is true. For this innovation to succeed, it would have had to have organic support. However, it is the substance not the form which is important here. You can’t call it a ‘community forum’ (rule 3), if you are allocated friends (rule 5), you’ll be allocated an avatar if you don’t get round to it (rule 6), you can only select one of five topics.
Perhaps the most authoritarian edict will be, worded as rule 10, that ‘Menshn will grow and change’. This is a cardinal sin in innovation. It is not up to Louise or Luke as to whether it grows – for all they know it might go the opposite of viral, and instead become extinct. It is, rather, the diffusion of the concept and the rate of uptake of the concept which will determine the success of the innovation. Diffusion of the concept depends much on how easy it is to use, and how likeable the platform; Menshn I feel fails on both arms of this test (bearing in mind how ‘buggy’ it is). The only possible thing which could accelerate early adoption of Menshn if there are well-liked and well-respected ‘users’ who take it to like a duck to water. Therefore, it is going to be crucial whether David Allen Green (@DavidAllenGreen) likes it, and it seems that @charonqc has formed an opinion thus,
If these two hugely popular tweeters really ‘took to’ Menshn, because they wanted to, this would make a critical difference. This is where rule 1 comes in – Bozier and Mensch would like you to ‘talk about it’, but of course any social media practitioner will tell you that criticisms can go viral too. Do Bozier and Mensch really wish criticisms of Menshn to go viral on Facebook or Twitter, such that #Menshn is trending for all the wrong reasons? Promisingly John Rentoul seems to have been recruited as an ‘early adopter’, but there is so much John can do on his own.
So believe-it-or I am relatively open-minded about it. I like Luke and Louise, and politically I think it is analogous to the ‘illusion of choice’ or the Tory definition of ‘organic’ – i.e. a top-down edict masquerading as ‘community action’, such as venture philanthropists “picking winners” in the disturbingly unlucky ‘Big Society’, or the new NHS Commissioning Board deciding what to do in a “GP-led NHS”. It’s not even that – I feel it fails on the basic criteria of innovation as the industry analysts understand it. I hope for the sake of Luke and Louise that I am proved wrong, and this time next year they’ll be millionaires!
BAILII – worthy of your urgent attention
They say you’ll only miss something when it’s gone.
I hope people will not be saying this of BAILII – if it happens that due to market forces it goes into extinction. Market forces have already seen an uninspiring impact on the legal profession, though making certain CABx go into liquidation in a ‘survival of the fittest’ Darwinian legal-economic climate. Even the new model legal curriculum promises to see the unprofitable ends of law get elbowed out, whether this be immigration, housing, disability benefits or asylum, as the ‘wealth creators’ get shoehorned in, such as share acquisitions and private equity.
As a website, BAILLI may not look snazzy. It may not achieve millions on the London Stock Exchange in the near future. It does, however, offer an incredible resource for law and is entirely free-of-charge and public, meaning any member of the public can look up judgments. Try it – here.
You probably don’t want to go there to see lots of targeted ads anyway based on your demographic profile. You may wish to be able to read any judgment from recent years, if you believe in access-to-law for all. Yet, this amazing website is facing financial difficulty. I have spoken to Joseph Ury of BAILLI who is one of the most genuinely nice people you will ever meet. He continues to explain the situation with modesty and politeness, but never with an ounce of anger.
The thing about BAILII is that it typifies innovation, as a popular, easy-to-use, effective resource where the user feels utterly involved. BAILLI is not a simply static invention, a repository of useful and redundant information; it fosters a culture of discovery, research, knowledge transfer and knowledge sharing. It allows things like the ‘Medici Effect’ and the ‘next adjacent’ in innovation to happen for real – in other words, as a legal academic or legal practitioner, you can make groundbreaking connections between diverse subject areas which you never knew had existed.
If you think this is something worth supporting, I strongly urge you to go to the new Facebook page here.
And make sure you follow @BAILII on Twitter here!
Make yourself known, and contribute to something worth protecting in this ideologically-driven age of austerity.
Finally, I strongly recommend you to look at the work of my peers/colleagues in this regard:
Saving Private Bailii and the Legal Communication Revolution (by @ilegal)
http://ilegality.tumblr.com/post/24123840258/saving-private-bailii-and-the-legal-communication
Justice’s hidden backbone – a tribute to BAILII (by @adamwagner1)
http://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2010/11/18/justices-hidden-backbone-a-tribute-to-bailii/
BAILII – by @familoo
http://pinktape.co.uk/uncategorized/bailii/
BAILII needs your cash regularly (by @nearlylegal)
http://nearlylegal.co.uk/blog/2011/06/bailii-needs-your-cash-regularly/
The broad church of legal #tweeps in the UK
In many ways, #Twitter is a joy, because it is potentially very democratising, allowing anyone to have a dominant presence on it, whether he or she be a GDL student, a member of the House of Lords, or a University Professor. However, it can be so easy to equate the number of followers on Twitter with quality. Legal tweeps in the UK don’t approach the heights of this notorious international tweep
Or maybe
Or maybe
Or maybe
It would in fact be dead easy to give the appearance of a large number of followers by a lack of blocking of spambots.
The starting point must be that the community of #legaltweeps in the UK constitutes a broach church. There are reliable #legaltweeps who are often ‘first’ with the breaking legal news, and who can offer a quick informed, detailed, well-evidenced commentary.
Unfortunately, some #legaltweeps, perhaps through having a high follower number, demonstrate personality traits akin to ‘narcissistic leaders’. The anthropologist Michael Maccoby in the Harvard Business Review offered this observation:
“Such love of the limelight often stems from what Freud called a narcissistic personality. Narcissists are good for companies in extraordinary times, those that need people with the passion and daring to take them in new directions. But narcissists can also lead companies into disaster by refusing to listen to the advice and warnings of their managers. It’s not always true, as Andy Grove famously put it, that only the paranoid survive. Most business advice is focused on the more analytic personality that Freud labeled obsessive. But recommendations about creating teamwork and being more receptive to subordinates will not resonate with narcissists. They didn’t get where they are by listening to others, so why should they listen to anyone when they’re at the top of their game?”
Interestingly Maccoby offers advice for such individuals, which presumably include narcissistic #legaltweeps:
“Narcissists who want to overcome the limits of their personalities must work as hard at that as they do at business success. One solution is to find a trusted sidekick, who can point out the operational requirements of the narcissistic leader’s often overly grandiose vision and keep him rooted in reality. Another is to take a leap of faith and go into psychoanalysis, which can give these leaders the tools to overcome their sometimes fatal character flaws.”
So, there you have it, it would be sensible for such tweeps to have a reliable ‘sidekick’. How might you spot such behaviour in the first place? Here’s part of the timeline of @iamsuperbreally:
Keeping such tweets in view of the public in timeline is a trick well known to marketers. Retweeting praise for you is a phenomenon known as ‘shilling‘ in marketing, for example:
‘Celebrity endorsements‘ are one way of promoting your product, and if you can display a demand for what you’re writing about, in the form of a complimentary tweet, that’s all well-and-good. It is clear to me and some of my friends I’ve spoken to at #tweetups that some #legaltweeps fancy themselves as a ‘gatekeeper’ for budding other tweeps, in a sort of ‘I can make or break their career’ way.
For encouraging ‘leadership following’, the ‘cultural web‘ has long provided that the judicious use of prizes can be used to harness a semblance of peer respect and recognition, and popularity, for example:
In this example, @iamsuperbreally apparently has made it onto an exclusive list of well-recognised #legaltweeps, and it appears that @iamsuperbreally doesn’t mind showing off in public that he or she even knows the judge (@creep4) socially!
Some #legaltweeps are genuinely expert, however, so here is @iamsuperbreally offering a comment on a study published by the Bar Standards Board. Twitter can cater for such a heterogeneity of tweets.
However, such a timeline can easily degenerate into a splurge of self-glorification, akin to this shown by @iamsuperbreally earlier today:
A full analysis of how legal #tweeps interact involves ‘social network’ theory, described briefly in Wikipedia as follows:
A social network is a social structure made up of a set of actors (such as individuals or organizations) and the dyadic ties between these actors (such as relationships, connections, or interactions). A social network perspective is employed to model the structure of a social group, how this structure influences other variables, or how structures change over time.[1]
Particularly interesting is here how certain #tweeps act as ‘lead users’ in the community, and how tweets may ‘diffuse’ across the whole network depending on, for example, popularity of certain individuals within the network and the rate of re-tweeting. Within that network, some tweeps can not only serve to promote the tweets of others (‘promoters’), but can try to dampen as best they can the tweeting activities of others (‘inhibitors’). This may be to protect ‘vested interests’, or to protect a microcosm of tweeting activity, or just purely accidental.
Nottingham Law School's day of legal education: innovation at the heart of education
I remember vividly when Gary (must follow! @legalacademia) first told me he hoped for people to set out their vision for legal education, and to get a group of people together to discuss a possible way-forward. This Thursday Gary’s hard work and idea came to fruition, though I must say the panel discussion described in this blogpost must have involved a huge amount of co-ordination and planning!
Nottingham Law School (Nottingham Conference Centre) was delighted to celebrate the launch of the Centre for Legal Education, with a full day dedicated to legal education on Thursday May 3rd, 2012. This coincided with a a discussion of legal education by people with a very active and practical interest in legal education, and marks a significant event in the work of Rebecca Huxley-Binns (@bexhuxbinns, please follow on Twitter), Reader in Legal Education, Nottingham Law School. Rebecca herself has been Law Teacher of the Year 2010, and is currently Secretary of the Association of Law Teachers. I feel personally that Rebecca deserves to be given a Chair at Nottingham for her contribution to legal education, and, equally important, for explaining innovative paradigms in legal education and for participating in a synthesis in higher-order cognition, affect and emotion in legal learning. The purpose of this blogpost is not to ‘create’ the timeline of this meeting organised by Gary and Rebecca, but instead for me to discuss the issue of innovative behaviour in legal education and the rather nebulous notion of ‘commercial awareness’. For a faithful timetable of the discussion itself, please do trace the #NSLED tweets on Twitter, or go to the excellent relevant blogposts on Paul Maharg’s blog.
In the morning, there was a ‘Question Time’ panel, chaired by Baroness Ruth Deech, Chair of the Bar Standards Board (@barstandards) to discuss various Visions of Legal Education. The panelists include David Urpeth, Partner at Irwin Mitchell; Gary Lee Walters of Stretlaw; Becky Huxley-Binns, Reader in Legal Education at Nottingham Law School; Nazmin Akthar, young barrister and legal blogger; and Baishali Majumdar, trainee solicitor and alumna of Nottingham Law School. Paul Hutchinson, Public Relations and Press Officer, also answered questions focussing on the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives.
The event lead sponsor was LexisNexis. The event was also kindly supported by Oxford University Press, Routledge Publishing and Hodder Education.
Gary Lee Walters is an innovative law teacher, whose website ‘Stretlaw‘ has gradually been receiving the very good recognition it deserves, for being an eLearning resource focused on law tuition, research, and commentary. It serves to facilitate group learning via interactive tutorials or one-to-one tuition. It facilitates eLearning by allowing students to take education wherever they wish.
Gary explained why he became interested in a fusion of technology and law, in legal education:
“In year two, I chose Law and Technology, simulation/essay based. I thrived and the combination of studying hard, my natural interest and curiosity with technology meant I gained a first in this module. Point here is that with interaction, as opposed to reading a traditional text book, one can gain valuable insight into how law works in practice, and by embracing law, enjoy it more so.”
This, I feel, is noteworthy for two reasons. Firstly, it reflects what is true innovation. I personally came top in the innovation MBA class at BPP Business School (2011-2). Innovation for me is building a distributed network where contributors freely participate in a network, but its fundamental success depends on its adoption by users and successful interaction between the innovator and the recipient of that innovation. It is a critical way, if used properly, for business entities to build competitive advantage. I feel far too often, in a way like disability, “diversity” and corporate social responsibility, it is used by law firms as a cheap advertising or marketing gimmick, without being understood properly. Secondly, Gary would like to see more ‘simulations’ in the curriculum. This I feel is interesting for two reasons. Simulations introduce a component called ‘face validity‘ (much studied in neuropsychology, the subject of my own PhD at Cambridge), in other words what you are learning (and assessing) is comparable to a real-life experience; which must surely be vital for legal education? Also, I think simulations is genuinely an example of innovative behaviour, which fits in very nicely with the work of Dr. Paul Maharg, Professor of Legal Education at Northumbria University. As Paul and Martin Owen, from the University of Warwick UK Centre for Legal Education, describe,
“Simulation is one of the major applications of the web in entertainment and training, but has so far received little attention from HE and FE. It is becoming increasingly clear that simulations can be used for educational purposes, but how can they be used most effectively with students? How do they affect other areas of the legal curriculum? Can all professions use them equally effectively, and if so under which conditions? These and other questions are at centre of a two-year funded project, Transactional Learning Environment (TLE) 2.0, which sets out to create an environment, use it within variety of disciplines and sub-areas within law, and evaluate the results.”
The other most eye-catching part of the event for me was the discussion of commercial awareness. Elsewhere on the IT superhighway, this was tweeted by Prof Richard Moorhead, about to assume a Chair at UCL, but currently a Chair in Cardiff:
What then is “commercial awareness”? I am continuously surprised about how little ‘commercial awareness’ there is amongst my other LPC students. At the most basic level, I agree with the many who say that such individuals lack any compass of business acumen. This is bound to be problematic, even in advising a client when a case might be in their own best interest (a mandatory outcome of the SRA’s Code of Conduct), or thinking whether your law firm can or should allocate sufficient resources in a traditional law firm or ABS environment. Simply put, I don’t think many other students have a clue about what is happening in the outside world around them in business or finance, let alone the major transactions of the City which corporate lawyers deal with (literally) on a daily basis.
David Urpeth tackled this issue head on:
“The chance to explore and apply legal rules and concepts with real clients is an invaluable experience. It reinforces the discussion in academic texts for the need of such opportunities within an undergraduate law degree (Richard Grimes, „The (book) case of learning by doing? (2002) 152 NLJ 1516) . These modules are only the start of what is to come. As the competition for training contracts becomes even fiercer than it currently is, the need for students to gain commercial awareness and a business-like manner, I feel, will be more important than ever. “
My concern is, obviously, is that students learn about ‘commercial awareness’ simply because it looks good to get a training contract. Indeed, my own Society at BPP (the BPP Legal Awareness Society) has students attending who, above all, want to be seen to be developing some commercial awareness so that they can put it down on a training contract application.
Having completed my MBA earlier this year (I am due to graduate officially in November 2012), and having graduated from the College of Law in International Commercial Law in December 2011, I can say ‘commercial awareness’ is simply having a feel for what businesses do. Good businesses will maximise shareholder profit through maximising ‘competitive advantage’, but really good businesses will do so having a regard for corporate social responsibility and maximising shared social value within and beyond their business entity. I do not apologise for this being in business speak, as that is what business means to business professionals. Lawyers should not pretend to be business professionals (it is always annoying for professionals to find their territory being invaded by other professionals), but they should have some idea of the world outside their microcosm. As for Baroness Deech’s question as to why lawyers in 2012 should be interested in this stuff, whereas it was not a burning problem for people studying jurisprudence some years ago, you’ll imagine that I have a number of valid views on that. However, I agree with Baroness Deech in having an education system fit-for-purpose; as a Cambridge graduate (different from the place where Baroness Deech trained originally), we have to ensure that legal education is ready for the modern age, while having some nostalgia and respect for how things have been done, I humbly submit.
I’ll leave you with some pictures that my friend, Jon, kindly took on my behalf. I am extremely grateful to Jon for having done this. Please follow Jon on Twitter #ff (@colmmu) – really nice guy, and extremely fluent in the language of new media, technology, legal education and innovation.
In summary, this event captured successfully the flavour of some of the more pressing debates in legal education, without suffering from an ‘ivory tower syndrome’, and in particular addressed two issues of interest to me as a current legal student and MBA graduate, the advancement of innovative techniques in modern English legal education, and issue of ‘commercial awareness’, so critical for all law firms (some more than others, perhaps), all law students and all law education providers.
References
Paul Maharg et al. (2008) ‘An informal discussion of simulation in legal education: SIMPLE in the US?’, Transforming Legal Education – CALI Conference for Law School Computing – University of Maryland, Baltimore, USA, United Kingdom, 19/06/08 – 21/06/08, .
Affect and Legal Education Emotion in Learning and Teaching the Law [published by Ashgate: November 2011], edited by Paul Maharg,
Northumbria University, UK and Caroline Maughan, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. A description is provided here.
