Many thanks to Nick Holmes of Binary Law for his kind and flattering mention of Family Lore in the article he wrote for the April issue of the Legal Executive Journal.
The article included a couple of sample posts by myself and Nearly Legal. The Editor chose this post from Family Lore (and an extract from this excellent post by Nearly Legal), but amusingly he changed 'Muhammed' to 'M'. Chicken.
I thought I'd begin the new month with a celebration of the best of the old. My (entirely personal) award for the best blawgpost of April 2008 goes to Charon QC for "A trip to The Heron".
Please, don't ask me to explain exactly what the post is about - when one reads Finnigans Wake, one doesn't have a clue what it's about, but one knows that one is reading a work of genius.
As we speak, the prize of a virtual case of Barón de Barbón Oak-Aged Rioja 2004 is winging it's way across the internet to Charon QC.
Not content with setting up REDUX law, which will be used for his Contract/Commercial law materials, Charon QC has also set up the insitelaw newswire and the insitelaw blog to go with it. The two are intended to work in tandem, with a main focus on "news of and comment on developments in law and practice". Thankfully, the Charon QC blawg will remain, and will "be almost entirely free of serious law". Does this man ever sleep?
In a new feature for Family Lore I thought I would award a trophy for the best post I have read each month on a law blog. This is purely subjective, and my decision is final. There may be other posts that you think are better (please let me know if this is the case), but either I haven't read them, or I prefer the one I've chosen. I'll try to make this a regular feature if I can be arsed remember to do so.
There can only be one winner of my award for March. For his wonderful insight into the inner workings of the judiciary, and for going beyond the call of duty to achieve the result the client seeks, it goes to Geeklawyer for his post "Pole dancing for the judge".
[A prize of a bottle of Moniak Mead will not be winging its way to Geeklawyer - sorry, times are hard.]
I hope I'm not jumping the gun in mentioning this (it wouldn't be the first time), but I've just noticed a brand new English family law blog. Laws of Love entered the blogosphere only yesterday (hopefully not an inauspicious date), and is written by Southampton-based barrister Mark Chaloner. Mark says that he fancies "having a forum to vent my spleen, inform and (hopefully) amuse others with the madness that is practice in family law". Sounds like a man after my own heart. Oh, and thanks for the mention of Family Lore in your first post, Mark!
Today I had the pleasure and privilege of taking part in a LexBlog Question and Answer interview, discussing the state of the English legal blogosphere. The interview can be found on Kevin O'Keefe's blog, Real Lawyers Have Blogs.
I thought it was time to review the state of family law blogging in this country. I'll review every UK family law blog that I'm aware of (if you are aware of any others, please let me know), although I don't intend to be too critical, as I don't think that that would be appropriate - these blogs are written by people in their spare time and provide a free service to other lawyers and members of the public. This post is intended partly as an update, and partly as an introduction for new readers.
Before I begin, a quick word on the state of UK family law blogging. Considering the number of family lawyers on these islands, and the number of people affected by the family justice system, there aren't an awful lot of UK family law blogs. There have been a few recent additions, but there are also several that have suffered from a distinct lack of recent posting. In alphabetical order, these are the ones I know about:
The Ancillary Actuary
We start with something different from the rest. The Ancillary Actuary is a blog by "actuarial and administrative professional services firm" Bradshaw, Dixon and Moore, and "is intended to encourage an exchange of ideas and promote debate about the financial issues that arise in a relationship breakdown". The blog is an extremely useful resource for advisers, particularly upon the complexities surrounding pensions and divorce.
Benussi Blog
A serious blog by Diane Benussi, senior partner of Benussi & Co, a "niche matrimonial law firm" based in Birmingham. The blog concentrates on dealing with the practical and emotional aspects of relationship breakdown, so is aimed very much at clients rather than lawyers. Some excellent advice is to be found, although it would be a little easier to find it if the posts were arranged by subject matter.
Bloody Relations
Written by barrister Jacqui Gilliatt, Bloody Relations comprises a mix of serious and not-so-serious posts on all aspects of family law, including public law matters. Contains information and advice not just for lawyers but also for non-lawyers, such as this excellent post, which should be compulsory reading for anyone involved in family court proceedings. One of my favourites.
Child Lawyer
I had feared that this blog was moribund, but there have been a couple of recent posts. Written by Sophia Cannon, the blog is a "perspective of an English Child Law barrister, with an urban London practice, specialising with non-traditional families with reference to family, pregnancy and child law, including crimes committed against vulnerable adults, young people and children". Hopefully, Sophia will find time to post more frequently in the future.
Clarendon Chambers Family Law Team Update
Written (unsurprisingly) by the family law team at Clarendon Chambers, this blog started last September and hasn't been updated since early December. I hope it hasn't 'died a death', as this could be a very useful resource for all family lawyers.
Divorce Solicitor
Written by Southampton solicitor Lynne Bastow, Divorce Solicitor was, as I recall, the second UK family law blog, and it remains one of the best. Lynne writes primarily for clients and, like Diane Benussi, deals particularly with the practical and emotional aspects of relationship breakdown, albeit in a very different style. This is another one of my favourites, despite the fact that Lynne appears to have a sticky exclamation-mark key on her keyboard!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Divorce Survivor
To my knowledge, this is still the only Scottish family law blog, and it's not even written by a lawyer (perhaps Scottish lawyers are all too busy to blog). The author, 'Fiona', works in the engineering industry, but is also a divorcée, which I presume accounts for her interest in family law. She started the blog at the beginning of January and has regularly updated it since with interesting content, particularly (of course) relating to the Scottish legal system.
The Editorial
This was started in January as part of an ambitious project to provide a place where family lawyers share their knowledge. Unfortunately, it's hardly been updated since then, and a page on the blog aggregating feeds from other family law blogs has been 'beaten to it' by Nick Holmes' Family Law Pipe. I hope the unnamed author (apparently a recently qualified solicitor) hasn't lost enthusiasm.
Family Law Matters
Uniquely amongst UK family law blogs, this blog is integral to the website of SpainWilliams LLP, a specialist family law firm in Kent. The content comprises mainly legal advice for clients going through separation and divorce. An interesting concept, and one that I expect will be emulated by other firms.
Family Law Week Blog
This blog complements the excellent and extremely useful Family Law Week, which provides training and free legal news and case reports. The content comprises updates on family law, many of which are written by the energetic Jacqui Gilliatt of Bloody Relations, above.
Family Lore
Being too modest to comment upon his own work, John has asked me to say something nice about Family Lore. Something nice? Good to see that he still has a sense of humour after two-plus years and 550 posts. I've tried to keep him on the straight and narrow, but sometimes he just won't listen to me. Family Lore is a mix of posts that I suppose may be of interest to some, and other rubbish that I wouldn't touch without a liberal sprinkling of Go-Cat.
Judith's Divorce Blog
Written by Judith Middleton of Darlington firm Latimer Hinks, this blog has a quite unique feel about it. Although some of the posts are serious in nature, many are quite whimsical, flowing from news stories or incidents in Judith's personal life. Imaginative, informative and often amusing - what more could you ask of a blog? Another of my favourites.
Marilyn Stowe Blog
A very professional blog, by solicitor Marilyn Stowe of Stowe Family Law LLP. Unusually, the blog was created by a website design company, although I don't know whether they also created the blogging software, or just a theme for 'off the shelf' software. Either way, they have achieved a polished look that compliments Marilyn's thoughtful posts on serious legal topics.
Pink Tape
Last but not least comes Pink Tape, by barrister Lucy Reed. Very well written, Pink Tape contains posts on a wide variety of family law topics, often with a self-deprecating good humour. Unfortunately, Lucy hasn't been posting that much recently, partly because she has foolishly decided to start a family. I hope she will be able to blog more frequently again, as I really enjoy her writing, although I do have one small request: could you put a blank line between paragraphs?
Right, after that, I'm off to have a rest. I hope I haven't offended anyone too much...
Just a quick post to say that, due to unfortunate circumstances, Geeklawyer's blog is currently squatting in temporary chambers, here.
Read More...My happiness at seeing that Family Lore has enjoyed a record number of hits this month was somewhat tempered when I realised that a large number of people from all around the world found their way here due to an unhealthy interest in having 'relations' with our canine companions, no doubt due to the title to this post. Similarly, searchers for 'family sex blogs' and 'money sex' were no doubt disappointed.
What other unusual search terms have led visitors here this month? Well, quite a mixed bag. The person who was looking for 'dentists blogs' would have been out of luck, as would the person looking for a '999 transcript' (any transcript in particular?). On the other hand, at least whoever Googled 'in laws causing divorce' would have come to a relevant blog, even if they didn't find exactly what they were seeking, as would the searcher for 'divorced family queries posted 2007', even if I don't know what they were seeking.
Moving on, whilst the interweb may be a wonderful thing, I think sometimes people can be a little optimistic as to its capabilities. Whoever wanted the answer to the question 'how to defend yourself in court against a borderline personality disorder accusing you of domestic violence' was, with respect, asking a little too much of the technology, although I hope they found the answer somewhere, and preferably before the hearing date.
Next, someone who was possibly mixing me up with a certain fellow blogger searched for 'history of johnny charon the lawyer'. Perhaps it was just as well they came here, as I'm not sure the world is yet ready to know the murky history of 'charon the lawyer'.
Then you always get the odd surrealist searcher, looking for something, but I have no idea what. One such this month was 'nice work if you can get it chords' - from an unemployed musician perhaps?
Lastly, we have two related search strings, one of which I trust did find something helpful on Family Lore, the other of which may be beyond all help: the moving 'stories of despair and hope' and the poignant 'its the hope i cant stand'.
So, you've been working all night on that killer blog post, endlessly amending and improving it. At last you're happy with your masterpiece. You finally click 'Publish', and the job's finished. Well, not quite. Wired Magazine takes up the story:
"Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you've written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers."
Wired has an infographic (above), giving full details of the process.
[Thanks to Boing Boing for the link to this story.]
I'd like to recommend a new UK family law blog, Divorce Survivor. This one however is different, for two reasons. Firstly, it is not written by a lawyer. Its author, Fiona (who bears an uncanny resemblance to a character from a certain children's film), works in engineering but is a divorcee, hence the blog title. Secondly, Fiona believes that hers is the first Scottish blog relating to divorce and family law. It will certainly be good to get a Scottish perspective. Fiona says that she intends to post her arbitrary thoughts in the hope that they might be of interest. I'm sure they will.
And with that, I've realised that this is my 500th post on Family Lore, so I'm off to lay down in a darkened room, and contemplate the meaning of life...
I had the pleasure this morning of taking part in Charon QC's first Weekend Audio Review Podcast, along with Carl Gardner of Head of Legal, Justin Patten of Human Law, Geeklawyer and Peter Rouse of Advizory. The podcast can be found on Consilio, here.
Here's an American case that is of interest both to divorce lawyers and to bloggers. In Garrido v. Krasnansky the Vermont Family Court has ordered the husband, William Krasnansky, to stop posting items about his wife and their failed marriage on his blog, 'LookAtMyPug's Jurnull', as reported in The New York Times. As the report indicates, the case raises issues about both spousal harassment and free speech.
Unrepentant, Mr. Krasnansky has refused to take down his blog, calling it “a deliberate act of civil disobedience.” He calls the blog "A Work Of Fiction", but a law professor advises that this might not protect him in a defamation claim, "especially if the court found that readers were likely to perceive the postings as factual statements about a real person and if the statements were false". Subject to this, the issue is between Ms. Garrido's right to protection from harassment (obviously a common thing for a divorce court to deal with), and Mr. Krasnansky's constitutional right to free speech, which his lawyer argues that the order breaches. It is not at all clear which of these should prevail, although, as the report points out, Ms. Garrido is certainly on stronger ground with her claim that Mr. Krasnansky has put excerpts from her old journals on the blog.
Web 2.0 guru Nick Holmes of Binary Law has created a useful tool for busy people wanting to check out the latest on the UK family law blog scene. FamilyLawPipe aggregates feeds from all UK family law blogs, and displays summaries of recent posts, with links back to the originals. Very convenient, especially for those who don't want to set up their own feed reader.
This could become something of considerable significance to family lawyers. Over the last few days I have been watching with interest as a new family law blog has been built. The Editorial will contain 'Hot Topics in UK Family Law', and specifically has a 'Hot Topics' page which is presently under construction but promises 'a feed of latest posts from around the blawgosphere'.
More importantly, however, the author (who has not, as yet, identified him/herself, save that he/she appears to be a fairly recently qualified solicitor) has a vision for the future of family law whereby family lawyers harness the power of Web 2.0 to share their knowledge. By adopting such a collaborative approach, he/she says, "we can ensure that clients never have to deal with ... badly trained, uninformed divorce lawyers". The author plans to start a website that will form the basis of this project, and the blog will ultimately form an editorial on that site. A fascinating idea, and I wish him/her every success.
I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank post where my fingers move.
Through the flap comes a cat:
He glances at the screen
Then, looking up at me
He raises an eyebrow
"A tad pretentious don't you think?"
Says Muhammad
"You're right, of course"
I said
He began washing.
"It's just blog, not a work of art"
He said, as a paw
Rounded his ear
I nodded my head, sheepishly
Watching his pink tongue
Lick his paw again
"But still," I said
"The post is printed."
[With sincere apologies to Ted Hughes]
...and further to this post, I fear that my addiction to blogging may be more than 62%. I started writing the post below at about 3am this morning, after not being able to sleep. Why I should get out of bed in the middle of the night, read the Times law reports and write a blog post is beyond me. Not only that, but when I did return to bed I then thought of something to add to the post, got up again, fired up the laptop again, and amended the post.
Sad.
Thanks to Charon QC (or is it Charoron QC?), Family Lore now appears on the Blawg Review Guest Map.
Presently these sceptred isles are somewhat sparsely populated. Come on you UK blawgers - put yourselves on the map!
Peter Moore, Managing Director of actuaries Bradshaw, Dixon & Moore has just informed me of his firm's new blog, The Ancillary Actuary. The blog "is intended to encourage an exchange of ideas and promote debate about the financial issues that arise in a relationship breakdown". It is still in its infancy, but already contains a useful series of posts on the complex (at least to us family lawyers!) subject of pension valuation.
