Geeklawyer was a lit­tle appre­hen­sive about the UK and Europe’s first legal blog­gers con­fer­ence. Would it be well attended? would it get sup­port? would peo­ple find the con­tent to be use­ful and would the social net­work­ing work?

Yes.

Caveats exist on the delight both Geeklawyer and Ruthie felt about the results: it was a lit­tle small, though this was down to the still small size of the legal blog­ging com­mu­nity, some­thing that will change in future years; and sev­eral desir­able blog­gers failed to show up; try­ing to co-ordinate the diaries of more than two lawyers is usu­ally a night­mare so the fact that we man­aged it for thirty is an achieve­ment in itself, but inevitably some aca­d­e­mics such as Mar­tin fell vic­tim to exam mark­ing, pupil­blog­ger & Liad­nan fell prey to clerks and Cor­po­rate Blawg col­lapsed under the weight of numer­ous client files sud­denly being heaped unan­nounced on his head.

Nonethe­less, these were merely small clouds on an oth­er­wise sunny and clear blue sky. Sev­eral mem­bers of both the gen­eral and trade press were present so we hope that the evan­gel­i­cal com­po­nent of the con­fer­ence will achieve its goal of greater aware­ness and uptake of lawyer blog­ging in the UK.

Sev­eral speaker com­mented on the mixed objec­tives of blog­gers. CharonQC spoke of the ego­tists ranters anar­chists seri­ous com­menters and mar­ket­ing depart­ments; and the hor­rors inflicted by errors such as the infa­mous Wat­son Far­ley Williams deba­cle; and he pro­vided a tax­on­omy of blogging.

Geeklawyer spoke of the four main dan­gers of blog­ging for lawyers: pro­fes­sional mis­con­duct, the Google eter­nal mem­ory prob­lem, mali­cious com­menters and lack of blog upkeep. He also dis­cussed the acqui­si­tion and con­trol of co-bloggers.

Justin Pat­ten led what ended up as quite inter­est­ing ques­tion and answer ses­sion on such things as the goals and objec­tives of blog­ging as well as the risks.

Ruthie talked about her life as a blog­ging side­kick. Inevitably much of this was biased pro­pa­ganda pre­sent­ing her twisted agenda and deluded griev­ances; no-one, it seemed to the more bal­anced Geeklawyer, was fooled for a moment.

Ruthie caused a sig­nif­i­cant amount of dis­ap­point­ment by not turn­ing up in her famous pink leather motor­cy­cle jacket cit­ing its weight and the heat. A rather glo­ri­ous Chi­nese smok­ing jacket, while in other cir­cum­stances sen­sa­tional, failed to be an ade­quate sub­sti­tute for the lech­ing lawyers present. She pre­sented her plan for a Ruthie cal­en­dar for next year and mer­chan­dise like t-shirts mugs and leather­ware. Lack­ing any con­cept of dis­cus­sion she dis­closed some gos­sip about Geeklawyer’s ini­tial inabil­ity to man­age her effec­tively as a blog­ger (guilty). She said that while she was not anony­mous she didn’t exploit the blog as a mar­ket­ing oppor­tu­nity and eschewed pro­vid­ing free legal advice. She also com­mented on the dis­ap­point­ing inevitabil­ity of sex­ual dis­cus­sion in a post mak­ing it mas­sively and endur­ingly popular.

Per­haps the sur­pris­ing hits of the con­fer­ence were Head­shift Con­sul­tancy and Pro­fes­sor Jeremy Phillips of IPKat. Of all the con­fer­ence atten­dees Geeklawyer was most ner­vous of Head­shift because of their con­tent. They emailed him when they heard of the con­fer­ence and Geeklawyer thought they were doing some­thing that sounded inter­est­ing. The trou­ble is that being a bit of a geek Geeklawyer has a dis­torted value and inter­est sys­tem and per­haps, just per­haps, this geeky stuff attracts him in a way it may not or should not do for any­one sen­si­ble: like lawyers. Head­shift dis­cussed the use of social net­work­ing to pro­vide resources within large firms and organ­i­sa­tions using easy exist­ing soft­ware Wikis social book­mark­ing tag­ging and blogs. They described how quickly built projects cost­ing next to noth­ing rad­i­cally changed knowl­edge shar­ing and work­flows in sev­eral promi­nent law firms, out­per­form­ing vastly more expen­sive soft­ware that took ages to develop. Geeklawyer knew all the tech­nol­ogy well but hadn’t con­sid­ered its use in this way. He found it to be a rev­o­lu­tion­ary idea and it gen­uinely has made him look at whether he can adopt this on a lesser scale for his own needs. To his aston­ish­ment sev­eral other lawyers said to him after­wards, unbid­den, how inter­est­ing this talk was and what rev­o­lu­tion­ary ideas it revealed.

Pro­fes­sor Jeremy Phillips was the other great sur­prise: Geeklawyer had of course read his blog on innu­mer­able occa­sions and took it as the prod­uct of a heavy­weight and aus­tere intel­lec­tual. In real­ity Jeremy was funny friendly and polite. He told the rather impres­sive story of the cre­ation and growth of IPKat, and he was a highly engag­ing speaker.

Geeklawyer has attempted to per­suade IPKat to cast him its unwanted news tips.

There should be MP3’s of the con­fer­ence at some point: but the audio qual­ity of Geeklawyer’s record­ings is a bit poor: it sounds like the ser­mon on the mount recorded from half a mile away, against the wind and with a huge dis­con­tented audience.

Update:
Eeek!