On 12th March 1829 undergraduates at the University of Cambridge sent a challenge to their counterparts at Oxford and started a tradition which continues in more or less the same form to this day. If you missed it last Saturday, imagine 16 heavy athletic men, plus a smaller man and a girl, afloat on the… Read More »
Visiting museums and art galleries is an essential part of the experience of visiting new places. That is not to say that I do not from time to time visit museums in this country with which I am already familiar but the collections which tend to stand out in my mind are those which are… Read More »
What a few months it has been! I am not talking about erupting volcanoes and disrupted airline schedules, the General Election (although I see from Twitter that “Doing a Rochdale” is likely to rank highly in the litany of public gaffes alongside President Ford’s “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe” and Gerald Ratner’s… Read More »
Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb were two bad mice. Beatrix Potter conceived the story of how they both created mayhem in the dolls’ house belonging to Lucinda and Jane, while the dolls were out in their pram. When the little girl who owns the dolls’ house discovers the mess, she gets a doll dressed up… Read More »
The judgment in Gavin Goodale & Others v The Ministry of Justice & Others was delivered by the Senior Master, Master Whitaker, in November last year and is now available on BAILII [http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2009/B41.html] Master Whitaker is well known as an advocate of proportionate e-disclosure in appropriate cases and also as a judge experienced in dealing… Read More »
What have the following in common? Britain’s forthcoming defence review. Jackie Fisher, First Sea Lord at the end of the 19th Century. John Terry, Chelsea and England footballer. Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus. The Royal Navy. Answers on a postcard please!
A recent US case of a law firm suing a client contains a salutary lesson. Debevoise & Plimpton had sued former client Candlewood for $6million in unpaid legal fees and found itself facing “an answer and counterclaim” seeking damages of $55million! [Ex-Debevoise Client Raises Nasty Counterclaims in Unpaid Bills Case, The American Lawyer, 14 January,… Read More »
Let me remind you of the hoary old statistic often trotted out, namely that some 90% of corporate documentation is now created electronically rather than on paper, and over 90% of that is NEVER turned into paper. Whether the statistics are accurate or not, there can be no doubt that vast amounts of information are… Read More »
Latin phrases used to be an important part of a lawyer’s armoury, if only to confuse those without a classical education into believing that a mundane set of words must be important because of the solemnity with which they were intoned. Doubtless this also justified instructing a lawyer and a fee as the ordinary person… Read More »
“May you live in interesting times” is reputedly the English version or paraphrase of an ancient Chinese curse. Whatever its origin, the saying crops up in a variety of differing situations including a speech by Robert F Kennedy in 1966, a letter from Austen Chamberlain to a member of the US House of Representatives and… Read More »