I was asked to speak at the Law Society of Scotland’s In-House Lawyers’ Conference on Friday.  The theme of this year’s event was ‘Risk & Compliance’.  This got me thinking about the role of the employment lawyer in advising employers.  For me, there was a real resonance with the theme of risk management. 

The modern role of employment lawyer has become much more about assessing and managing risk than when I first started out as an employment lawyer in the 1990s.  At that time,…

As a Property Lawyer, I usually focus on Conveyancing  issues, but the recent moves by Ken Clarke to criminalise squatting caught my attention.

As I wrote this morning on my Conveyancing blog, the threat of…

The legal services profession has just gone through it’s ‘big bang’ and the financial services profession is fast approaching it’s own evolutionary event (the coming into effect of the Retail Distribution Review on 1st Jan 2013). The commonalities between the two are many.

Access & Transparency for consumers

The principle behind both the Legal Services Act and the Retail Distribution Review (RDR) is to make access to legal…

As part of BLP's commitment to social media, Remedy was commissioned by the firm to write, design and produce the guide in an online, interactive form.



The finished guide explains the relevance and importance of social media in today’s marketing mix and describes the most effective ways to manage social media activity to achieve maximum impact.



With busy lawyers in mind, the guide provides useful tips and also showcases best practice in a variety of social media spaces such…

Professional Email Marketing Made Easy

Professional email marketing is not about sending huge volumes of unsolicited emails to an unknown audience, it is an essential tool to achieve a broad range of marketing objectives including:

• Generating brand awareness

• Stimulating interest for a product or service

• Building customer relationships

• Delivering newsletters

The world of email marketing is certainly fast moving.…

Increase Brand Awareness and Credibility

As a successful lawyer you’ll know that keeping clients is the easy part – after all, you’re successful because you’re good at what you do.  You’ll also know that finding new clients  is  the toughest part because you spend eye-watering sums of time and money either impressing  them with far-reaching marketing campaigns or while networking and entertaining.

Fortunately, with the arrival of video marketing, you now have a tool…

There is now an incredible amount of data available on the Web and it is growing all the time.   For example; every minute 600 new blog posts are added, every second you are reading this article over 30,000 Tweets are sent and over 240,000 additions are made to Facebook. LinkedIn has over 26 million members in Europe with over 6 million in the UK and worldwide has over 2 million Company Pages.  Search engines such as Google or Bing provide us with ways of searching all this data…

"What do you think of when you hear the term Social Media”?

If the images that come to mind are teenagers sharing embarrassing holiday photographs, celebrities sharing their most trivial thoughts with their adoring masses or even people using it to break legal injunctions then you’re only seeing a very small part of the picture.

Quinn Wilson Associates invite you to think instead of the power of word of mouth recommendations, that most powerful method of…

Why Law Firms Are Using Reputation Management everyday!

Reputation management is considered highly important to law firms  today. Gone are the days when Law firms relied upon sources of information to be limited to just their website or press release. With a new era of online marketing, Google is no longer just a search engine, but a highly effective reference point for both positive and negative reference links.This is great for social media…

I published a post towards the end of last month and never got round to putting it on here.. Sorry Rich!

The post was prompted by a statement I saw in a tweet from July (I think). It stated “Collaboration platforms that allow client access will become table stakes within a few years among leading law firms”.

It’s an interesting statement and got me thinking. What sort of things are needed to enable this to become a key pillar in client engagement? Obviously there’s things like…

I want to ask a question, how many of you would consider acting for a family member or friend?

I'm betting the answer is that few of you will say yes to this.  I've heard the run of reasoning why people won't act for friends or relatives and they mostly boil down to "what if it goes wrong?"

Yes of course that's a good point, if it all goes wrong you could end up losing a friend or starting a family fewd, but, ask yourself this, if you were looking for a plumber or an…

A couple of weeks ago I raised the question of cuts to public funding and the knock on effect to Access to Justice. I was adding my voice to those arguing that this was a false economy; in both social and economic terms. One major fear concerns the capacity of the courts to cope with the inevitable increase in unrepresented parties before the courts.



This concern was shared yesterday by the country's leading judges.



Lord Hope, one of the Supreme Court judges said -…

So, another year, another guide. Chambers UK 2012 was launched last night and I hope the evening went well and that those that attended (and even those that didn't) find themselves and the firms they work for ranked where they hoped they would be.

Last night's launch was the first launch that I've not been to in 12 years. As I settled down to Location, Location, Location on catch-up, a small part of me wept that I was missing out. Missing out? What on earth was I…

Family law soliitor Lisa Grimmett takes a look at the true impact of the proposed legal aid cuts.

"It is high time the consequences of the legal aid cuts are brought to light. The government aims to save money saying £2 billion a year is an expensive legal aid system, but that presumably also includes the criminal legal aid budget. The proposed cuts will directly impact upon separating couples and cases…

Many commercial lawyers will in recent years have had to turn their attention to insolvency cases at one time or another. …

If you're interested in how to improve the success and financial/strategic returns from managing client relationships and CRM efforts in your firm, you can now access a free executive report of a study Thriving recently carried out in conjunction with Managing Partners Forum and Professional Marketing Forum. There were 277 participants in total, 150 of whom came from law firms.  

The executive report covers insight into what activities are undertaken by those firms reporting…

As IT Manager at Dolmans in Cardiff I am interested to learn of any Firm that has implemented a successful speech recognition project.  We implemented ours about 2 years ago using Dragon Dictate.  This along with the implementation of a new Case Management System had profound changes to our working practices and support overheads...  Just wondering what the general feeling towards it was...

According to the 2011CIPD/Simplyhealth absence report, stress is now the biggest cause of long-term absence from work.

This news comes as no surprise when we are repeatedly being exposed to negativity, directly or indirectly through our

employer or the media, threatening our job security.  Consider just a small selection of recent headlines:…

Over the weekend the Sunday Telegraph reported that agency truck drivers providing services to Tesco have been asked to sign contracts waiving certain rights under the new Agency Workers Regulations 2010. This is not however a great surprise: it would seem that Tesco is merely seeking to take advantage of the so-called ‘Swedish Derogation Model’, which provides an exemption within the Regulations regarding the right of agency workers to equal treatment in relation to pay.

The Agency…