Christmas book recommendations (2)

The limitation period on festive gift buying is about to expire. File a claim for peace and goodwill before it's too late! But if you can't face the crush in the last minute bargain basement of your local department store, fear not. Help is at hand in the bookshop. And for those with e-readers and i-pads, what could be easier than the virtual gift of an e-book?

Fans of Gary Slapper's column in the The Times will be familiar with the mixture of dry humour and jurisprudential erudition with which he compiles stories from around the world about the strange cases that somehow never make it into the law reports. In 2009 some of these were collected into a book of Weird Cases published by Wildy, Simmons & Hill, which has just been made available as an e-book. Now comes a second volume, More Weird Cases, also available as an e-book (from Wildy & Sons Ltd).

In this you can read about the gang member from Los Angeles whose exercise of the right to silence was unable to save him from conviction after it was found that he had "gone to the trouble of having a detailed picture of a murder he'd committed tattooed on to his chest". The tattoo was used to identify him as the killer, helped by the fact that the liquor store where the murder took place had been carefully labelled in the image. Recounting this tale, from 2004, Slapper then segues effortlessly to 1888 and the story, taken from a novel by Sir Henry Rider Haggard, called Mrs Meeson's Will. In the novel, a dying man marooned on an island accepts the offer of a young woman, more likely than he to survive, to have his will tattooed onto her back. The woman herself is then "admitted to probate" to help validate the legacy to the dying man's nephew. This knitting together of thematically linked material from different times and places is typical of Slapper's urbane style as raconteur.

Alarming instances of violence against lawyers (recounted on pp 73 to 74) may not go down brilliantly with some beneficiaries of this book as a festive gift. No matter, they will entertain the non-lawyers. One is amused to find here one of the many tales concerning the barrister FE Smith (1872-1930) who, when he witnessed a man jostling a woman on a tram in Liverpool, stepped in and punched the brute so hard that he fell out and cracked his head, fatally, on the pavement. Smith's legal career, following a fugitive period in Malta, did not apparently suffer; he is the subject of many colourful anecdotes and ended up as Lord Chancellor with the title Lord Birkenhead. (Brokenhead might have been more appropriate.)

So why the duck and the weed on the cover? You'll have to read the rest of the book to find out. In fact, there's a serious likelihood (on a balance of probabilities) that if you buy this book for a friend or family member, it will arrive in a second hand condition, after you've perused its contents in the course of trying to wrap it up.

Talking of the notorious advocate and orator FE Smith (see above), here is one of his most famous forensic riposts (taken from wikiquotes):

Judge: I've listened to you for an hour and I'm none wiser.
Smith: None the wiser, perhaps, my lord but certainly better informed.

If anyone embodies this spirit of adversarial defiance in fiction it has to be Horace Rumpole.

Lawyers and non-lawyers alike have enjoyed the fictitious reminiscences of this noble curmudgeon, an "Old Bailey hack" whose advocacy on behalf of his clients often takes him well outside the walls of the courtroom, sleuthing for clues in the unlikeliest places. In Rumpole at Christmas, he learns crucial information to exonerate a client when taking another barrister's children to the pantomime, and in another story he encounters a bogus Santa Claus who comes to a children's party in chambers and attempts to rob the clerk's room of all the brief fees belatedly sent in by instructing solicitors. Rumpole persuades the man of the error of his ways. But Rumpole is uneasy with yuletide frivolity:

"I suppose what I have against Christmas Day is that the courts are all shut and no one is being tried for anything."

Perhaps it's also the fact that he has to spend more time with his wife, Hilda, otherwise known as She Who Must Be Obeyed, who is not above her own FE Smith moments:

"Do try and be serious, Rumpole. You're not nearly as funny as you think you are."

But she's wrong, and he is; and this book, a new paperback edition of a compilation of stories appearing in The Strand Magazine, Woman's Weekly, the Independent, and other newspapers, is a choice morsel for that long doze after lunch when everyone else is walking the dog and fire needs just one more little log to help warm your port. Put it in your bundle of authorities.

BabyBarista – The ICLR Online tips the scales of justice in your favour...

An insight into life as a pupil barrister on the BabyBarista blog today, with a little help from the ICLR and our new online service.

The above image is courtesy of the BabyBarista blog (illustrated by Alex Williams)

If you would like to try ICLR Online visit our website to set up your free one month trial.

Christmas book recommendations (1)

Buying yuletide gifts for lawyers is never an easy task. You could try choosing barristers' briefs at Ann Summers or, for the less adventurous, M&S, or you could link up with your loved one in a stylish pair of pink handcuffs, as advertised on Patrolstore. But for a safer bet, why not book them on a charge of goodwill with an entertaining novel or two?

Babybarista began (and continues) as a blog recording the antics of an eager and ambitious young barrister through his year of training as a pupil and as a junior tenant in chambers. His name is a tribute to the coffee-making requirements of pupils but his behaviour is far from servile in the various machinations through which he outwits all his rival pupils for the coveted tenancy and foils his opponents in love and in his growing legal practice. The daily blogs have been collected into two novels, so far: Law and Disorder and Law and Peace.

The book and the blog are beautifully illustrated by Alex Williams, who should now be familiar to followers of the ICLR as the cartoonist who devised the wickedly funny ad for the launch of ICLR Online. He also does the Queen's Counsel cartoons for The Times, and is co-author with Daniel R White of the Queen's Counsel Official Lawyers' Handbook

All the above books are available from Wildy & Sons Ltd, London's premier legal bookshop.

If you like Tim Kevan's Babybarista books, and want to win yourself a free copy, why not enter his Christmas Competition to help promote them? Res ipsa loquitur, but a good word in a wise ear never went amiss.

Judge for yourself and give us your verdict

The new ICLR Online service went live seven weeks ago, after a sell-out launch at Middle Temple. Our demos have gone down a storm at major events such as the BIALL, IBA and English Bar conferences. We've signed up over 500 free trials. We know people are using it. What we would like to know is, what do you think of it?

We're not the only ones. Nick Holmes, whose pioneering blog Binary Law has been dealing with all aspects of legal information in the digital age, recently posed, or posted, this question:

ICLR online – who’s putting it through its paces?

He, too, would like to know what people think:

I’m curious also why there has been almost zero feedback online since about the service – particularly as anyone can sign up for a free trial. I did and was quite impressed, but I’m not a real user able to evaluate it meaningfully. Surely this is a groundbreaking alternative to the expensive Wexis services for the individual barristers and small chambers?

He would like to input from "real users", such as judges and lawyers, students and academics, librarians and information professionals, to help him assess the service. We think his apparent modesty ("I'm not a real user") somewhat belies his long-standing expertise on legal information matters, to which his blog (on the air since 2004) stands tribute. He acknowledges, too, that the lack of exposure of ICLR Online about which he comments in his post is a largely online phenomenon: he cites the extensive pre-launch publicity with iconic poster campaigns in Chancery Lane and Temple tube stations, in legal journals and the national press, and the direct mail campaign and email promotion, not to mention a string of sponsored BabyBarista posts.

The answer to his apparent surprise at the lack of online user feedback might be that everyone who's used the service reckons it does exactly what it's supposed to and, if people find nothing to complain about, they don't tend to get worked up enough to go online and express a view. (A substantial number have expressed their approval by taking out subscriptions, so we must be doing something right.)

Another point might be that the sort of people who regularly appear in the blawgosphere tend to be journalists or commentators - pundits if you like - rather than bread and butter practitioners. When there are stories to talk about such as Britain's relationship to the European Court of Human Rights, or the sentencing of riot offenders, or Ken Clarke's latest MoJ initiative, it's unlikely these pundits are going to consume airtime and Rioja expatiating upon the wonderful neatness with which different categories of judicial consideration are colour-coded for clarity in the index cards on CitatorPlus, or the ease with which cases reported by ICLR at any time from 1865 to yesterday afternoon can be searched for and within, or at the touch of a button displayed in instant court-ready PDF format, well, the fact remains, it's a bit like saying a Rolls Royce engine purrs. It's no more than you'd expect. What else would it do?

An exception to the above is Ruth Bird, the Bodleian Law Librarian at the University of Oxford, (and therefore a real user of the sort whose views Nick Holmes is after) whose review on Slaw (a Canadian legal blog) was generally complimentary, while expressing anxiety (understandable from the point of view of an academic librarian) at the risk of content being withdrawn from the big aggregators. She means, of course, the same thing as Nick Holmes refers to in his portmanteau word "Wexis". And no, there is no current threat of ICLR withdrawing content from Lexis or Westlaw. Indeed we are proud to be part (a fairly critical part we suspect) of their smörgåsbord of content. But among the other virtues of the ICLR Online service which she highlights in her report, such as

"the ease with which one could locate and cross reference a case", "a link to the ICLRs citator/index card service which provides subject matter, appellate history and cases considered" and "a briefcase tool which allows a collection of authorities to be stored in one location for reference at a later date"

she also cites "the advantage of The Law Reports is that they are selected for the legal issues they raise". On this she quotes the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, as saying "Sometimes less is more."

So now the question is, do you agree? What do you think of ICLR Online? Nick Holmes would like an objective view, so do please get in touch with him. Or mention it in your blog. Or comment here, below, on ours. The ball is in your court.