Back to work blues

Well, it had to happen sometime. Normal service at work has been resumed and I’m once again a sardine wedged into a train-shaped tin disciplined commuter.

Actually, I found the Christmas break this year quite relaxing and I’ve had two full weeks off, so I really mustn’t complain.

Shortly before my previous blog post – published on Christmas Eve – I took the Law Society’s Christmas quiz, you know, to really get me into the festive mood.

Some of the questions struck me as strangely esoteric, unless you’ve got a perfect memory for statistics on family law issues and the like. I was rather disappointed with my score of 7/12 and, as I recall, the festive-flavoured ale I was savouring at the time did little to quell that sense of disappointment.

Still, the quiz had a Christmassy background and Christmassy music and at least the Law Society did something to mark the time of year. It’s nice to know those fees for practising certificates aren’t going entirely to waste.

On an entirely separate subject, has everyone noticed that hot cross buns have suddenly taken the place of mince pies, stollen cakes and panettone loaves in the supermarkets now? I died a little bit inside when I saw our Morrison’s bakery stuffed with hot cross buns on 30 December. And it’s not the first time this subject has got my panties in a bunch.

Roll on Easter.

Christmas Update

I’ve taken a bit of a break from blogging recently and there’s no point pretending I’ve not enjoyed it. That said, one of the things my unexpected hiatus has shown is that I’m not finished with Law Actually – at least not yet.

While I might be at a different stage of my blogging adventure than, say, four years ago, I’m certainly not ready to pack away the keyboard and retire. So you’re stuck with me, I’m afraid.

Away from blogging, over the last few weeks I’ve been grappling with and trying to understand why Christmas seems such an unwelcome struggle and half-hearted affair this time round. And it’s not so much me this time – honest!  While I’m often a bit of a festive grouch, it’s everyone else that seems to be struggling to generate much enthusiasm for this whole Christmas business in 2014.

Is it the fact the country’s coming out of the economic doldrums, the unseasonably mild autumn or the fact we’re just all so Christmassed-out, having to celebrate the wretched thing once every twelve months is just too much for us now?  I’ll keep pondering. 

Being unable to break with tradition, Law Actually’s got its Christmas-themed header in place – despite it being a bit of a token gesture low key design this year.

I’m hoping to pick my blogging pace back up over the Christmas break and, you know, actually publish some stuff.  It’s been kind of quiet around here recently and it’s about time that changed.

Pringle Criminal

From BBC News 07/11/14:

A man has been ordered to pay almost £500 in fines and costs for dropping a snack lid on the ground in Bristol.

Gareth Daniel, 31, of Humberstan Walk, was seen by a PCSO dropping a Pringles lid in Lawrence Weston, in April.

Bristol magistrates heard he failed to pay a £75 fixed penalty notice, so a final warning was sent. He was taken to court and the fine was raised to £200.

Mr Daniel must also pay costs totalling £298.75. The council said it "would not tolerate littering on any scale".

Well said that man. Littering is a slippery slope towards certain ruin and it represents so much of what’s wrong with modern society.

Incidentally, don’t you think I’ve done well to avoid any references to ‘popping and stopping’? I suspect Pringles have got a more twenty first century slogan now – probably with a wretched smartphone app to boot.

And talking of litter, whatever happened to the humble litter pick? As a primary school kid in 1990s, I remember them being all the rage – a term rarely went by when we weren’t picking up empty crisp packets from the surrounding hedgerows or the nearby beach.

I’m not sure quite what we learnt by wandering around with bin liners, but to this day, I know that if I ever see a spent hypodermic needle on the ground, I must leave it alone and tell a teacher.

Not an entirely wasted exercise then.

And I’m sure clearing up the mess of others did wonders for our moral fibre. It was good preparation for life as a lawyer too.

Wine Fraud: An Escalating Problem

Guest Post
Wine fraud has been a problem for about as long as wine has been produced and enjoyed. Even Pliny the Elder, the Ancient Roman philosopher, complained about it – there was so much fraudulent wine that even the nobles couldn’t be sure what they were drinking. And the problem has only got worse as time has gone by. But what exactly is wine fraud, and can it be combatted?

What Is Wine Fraud?

There are a few different varieties of wine fraud, but they all involve the same outcome: the customer ends up paying well over the odds for a wine of a much poorer quality than they’d expected.

Sometimes, the wine is adulterated – cheap products like fruit juices, chemicals and sweeteners can be added to the wine to help improve the substandard colour or flavour. Some instances of wine fraud are even simpler than that: the label of a cheap wine will be steamed off, and replaced with the label of a much more expensive variety.

There have even been a few cases in which an entire auction consignment of rare fine wines has turned out to be entirely fraudulent, costing people a massive amount of money for a few bottles of a wine that’s barely worth drinking. Wine Spectator magazine estimates that more than 5% of auctioned wine is counterfeit.

Notable Cases of Wine Fraud

Just this year, there have been two massive wine fraud cases. In September, a probe into an elaborate fraud operation uncovered well over 200,000 bottles’ worth of fake Brunello di Montalcino. A wine connoisseur had obtained fake labels of the Tuscan wine and managed to falsify certification in the area’s wine database, and was selling low-quality wine to local producers, passing it off as the coveted Brunello.

Luca Albertario, the chief of Siena police, stated that it was “the biggest fraud ever carried out in the food sector.” 220,000 bottles of poor wine was confiscated before it could go on the market; it wine would have sold for around £4m. The US – the world’s biggest importer of Brunello – stopped all imports of the wine until they were satisfied that good quality controls were in place.

In August, Rudy Kurniawan – one of the world’s top oenologists – was jailed for ten years and ordered to pay almost $30m in restitution. Kurniawan had sold more than $20m of fake wine over a decade or so, most of which was to just seven clients.

His deception was discovered in 2012, when a consignment of his (worth $3m) was rejected by the wine inspector at Hart Davis Hart auction house. Allan Frischman noticed some inaccuracies on the labels, and Kurniawan’s lies came to light. He had been blending cheap recent wines with substandard vintages, and passing them off as more prestigious varieties. For more on this, an authoritative independent wine merchant, Yapp Brothers provided more details of this within their ‘what is a fair sentence for wine fraud?’ post.

What Can Be Done to Combat Wine Fraud?

There are a number of ways to tell whether a wine is the genuine article or not, without having to open the bottle. Most of these methods involve looking for inconsistencies – the wrong kind of glass, a foil capsule instead of a wax one, labels using an incorrect font – but there are other ways being developed.

For wines currently being produced, some producers have started engraving serial numbers on the glass, or tightening the reins on their distribution processes. For older varieties, stable isotope analysis is being employed.

Billing is killing

Literally. From Roll on Friday 03/10/14:

A report by the Law Institute of Victoria (LIV) has revealed the key causes of stress and mental illness prevalent amongst lawyers are their working conditions, in particular, intolerable billing targets or working 80-hour-weeks.

Oh, you do surprise me.

The work, work, work culture that seems to have crept in to so many areas of legal practice today is stupidly short-sighted and symptomatic of so much that’s wrong with modern life and society as a whole. Work is important, clients’ needs are important, but none of it is worth making yourself ill over. But, when you’re trapped working in a firm which doesn’t take that view, life isn’t that simple.

I consider myself incredibly lucky that I’m in a firm which recognises there’s more to life that work. But by taking a more reasonable and a pragmatic approach, I think the firm gets more out of us. Let’s face it: fee earners working 80 hour weeks aren’t exactly going to be on sparkling form.  Believe it or not, lawyers are human – not billing machines.

The head of the LIV, Geoff Bowyer, said that many cases go untreated because lawyers fear stress or trauma will be interpreted as a sign of weakness which would impact on their career progression. He told Lawyers Weekly, “we need to ensure that by proper education and awareness it’s OK to put a call out there for help as opposed to just trying to soldier on”.

The findings coincide with an earlier report by the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Research Institute in 2009 which revealed that more than 50% of lawyers have depression during their working-life.

The other 50% didn’t want to admit to it then.

Passive aggressive lawyer tactics

Over the last few years, I’ve noticed some really super passive aggressive tricks commonly used by lawyers in communications with ‘the other side’. Used in the right way, these tricks can send the blood pressure of your fellow professionals sky high. Better still, the recipient might be sufficiently provoked to come back with a return serve of barely-disguised nastiness. Those kind of ‘back-and-forths’ can be looked back on fondly in the autumn of your career, or, if you’ve got a real corker, printed, framed and proudly displayed on your office wall.

Here are some of my favourites:

Snarky and patronising comment balloons. Yeah, I know we’re all guilty of those from time to time. Prefacing comments with the words “of course”, “obviously” or “clearly” are particularly prone to enrage. However, just because I complain about it, doesn’t mean to say I’m not also guilty. Ahem.

Eschewing email attachments and insist on sending a hard-copy travelling draft.  Heck, why let technology help you out when you can struggle along the old fashioned way?

Being overly formal in an email. “I refer to our previous correspondence in this matter and look forward to hearing from you thereon.” Lovely. I guess they missed the lesson on using plain English wherever possible in modern legal practice.

Deliberately downsampling documents so they’re borderline illegible (and insist on being unable to obtain clearer copies). I’ve also had a solicitor tell me his client can only send a photograph of the document. I countered this by sending him photo negatives of our client’s document. (Just kidding.)

Law firms should use more videos and less text (apparently)

On their websites, that is.

From the Solicitors Journal 13/10/14:

Websites of the UK's top 200 law firms are forgetting the 'user experience'

The country's top firms are ignoring the significant power of video to attract clients, a new report has suggested.

According to mmadigital, only 28 per cent of content is read on an average web page, compared to video which typically holds the attention of a viewer for two minutes.

Hmmm. Are potential clients really going to sit and watch a video on a law firm’s website and be swayed by that? That’s not a rhetorical question – I really don’t know. Maybe they are. But it seems a trifle strange to me.

Unsophisticated would-be clients will just use Google to find a law firm in their area (or a national centre churning out legal services factory style) and be principally concerned with obtaining the lowest price – ringing around if necessary. Medium sized businesses looking to instruct a firm may do a bit of their own research, but tend to be heavily swayed by past experience and the recommendations of others. Large, corporate clients aren’t going to choose to instruct a firm by looking at a firm’s website. Those kind of gigs are won through nepotism, networking and a lot of schmoozing (and sometimes a mixture of all three). So who is likely to choose a solicitor by watching videos on the web?

It’s a mystery.

Firms with video on their websites are 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google.

Oh cripes. Time to get embedding those videos folks!