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Useful Resources -
Commercial Products
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Written by Vivian To
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Wednesday, 10 June 2009 23:47 |
One of my solicitor friends who work in a small law firm have asked me to suggest legal resources essential for legal research. She explained that her clients require her to response swiftly and it pays in the long run to have a core set of resources at her finger tips. The question is what to choose from the multitude of resources that are on the market. Can she reasonably hope to buy just one or two items covering most of your information needs.
While it would be fair to say all depends on the nature of work of a particular practice, this answer is not helpful to the hard pressed lawyers. I decide to try and offer my two cents on this issue.
Lawyers should be familiar with paper back students’ textbook from their years of law school training. Titles such as Goode on Commercial Law; Tretial on Contract do give authoritative exposition and should be given due consideration when you try and built up a collection but I will not include them in my list.
Instead I will provide with a short list of resources that are useful for a general company / commercial practice. These resources have been chosen because they have helped me answer many queries in the past. My main focus are on costly practitioners’ text.
Here go my choices:
Chitty on Contract (UK)
Halsbury’s Laws of England
The Hong Kong Butterworth’s Company Law Handbook
Lewison, The Interpretation of Contract
Practical Commercial Precedents
Tolley’s Company Law
Lexis.com / Westlaw
This list is of course not comprehensive - far from it ! You might have some totally different titles in your mind. If you do, why not leave a comment and let me know your choices.
I will discuss a list of preferred book sellers in my next post.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 10 June 2009 23:57 )
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Useful Resources -
Free Stuff
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Written by Vivian To
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Thursday, 04 December 2008 22:41 |
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It is easy to dismiss Twitter as a trivial social media. You may think that no serious topic can be discussed in Twitter as it allows you to write no more than 140 characters for each of your message. You might be right and indeed many people are using it to broadcast personal news to their friends and family. But there are also people who are using Twitter to build up their business and to reach mass audience. One of these people is Guy Kawasaki who said that he could do without his mobile for a week but not Twitter as Twitter is his weapon. You might like to watch his recent interview here.
As a beginner in the use of social media, I am yet to discover the power of Twitter as described by Guy Kawasaki. Nonetheless, I have found Twitter helpful to my work.
For me Twitter is a source of information. I search Twitter for Tweets on a relevant topic and follow the links to find blogs or articles that are of interest. The difference between searching Google and Twitter is that when I search the Tweets I am searching for blogs and articles that are hot (i.e. that are on people's mind). Since each tweet is generated by Twitter's users, I am in effect searching the collective knowledge of the users of Twitter. Twitter also allows you to set up RSS feed for your search result which means I get updates of the searches uploaded to Google Reader.
If you have joined Twitter and found other potential use of Twitter, I would love to hear from you !
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Last Updated ( Friday, 02 January 2009 13:03 )
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Useful Resources -
Commercial Products
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Written by Vivian To
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Wednesday, 17 December 2008 14:08 |
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The Hong Kong Company Law Handbook is now in its 10th edition. This Handbook is updated annually and very popular amongst the lawyers. We received our copies about 10 days ago and these bright green paper back volumes now stand proudly with the older editions. A surprise came yesterday when we received a single page "Update" to the handbook. Since there is no accompanying letter to explain what the "Update" is all about, I was left to figure it out myself.
The "Update" is in fact an attempt to rectify errors which are omissions on the publishers part . The first group of amendments is to do with the Eight Schedule of the Companies Ordinance regarding fees payable to the Company Registrar. The second one is on the Third Schedule Part 1 where amendments to Point 3 from the Company (Amendment) Ordinance 2004 was omitted.
Not only does this kind of update irritates the librarians who are left to find a way to insert the words/ paragraph onto the specific pages, I feel that it is a complete public relation disaster to amend a supposedly authoritative legal book in this manner and within the first few weeks of its release!!
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 17 December 2008 23:14 )
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Useful Resources -
Free Stuff
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Written by Vivian To
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Monday, 08 December 2008 22:26 |
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I am experimenting with Twitter to see what use I could make of it. So far I have managed to discovered some useful blogs by searching Twitter. Judging from the amount of useful information I have discovered, I feel that there must be potential in Twitter yet to be discovered.
My search today led me to this article which talks about how lawyers can make use of Twitter. Admittedly, the content is rather US-centric but I think there are things that can be applied in Hong Kong if you read carefully.
Why not try out the ideas in the article and get ready to write your first Tweet ?
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 10 December 2008 05:36 )
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Information Management -
Creative Commons
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Written by Vivian To
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Tuesday, 14 October 2008 22:16 |
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It would be fair to say that the librarians in big is very weary about the phrase "Knowledge Management". When something is labelled "knowledge" suddenly documents are removed from the library and put on a pedestal that is beyond the reach of the average librarians. When in fact what is special about "knowledge management" is the word "knowledge" not "management"- let me explain.
The term knowledge management can mean many things. The experts will tell you that the design and layout of the office could have an impact on the sharing of knowledge. You could therefore re-design your office to encourage the flow of knowledge. However here I would like to concentrate on the organisation of documents which are labelled as knowledge.
As far as the organisation and retrieval of the documents are concerned, there is really no magic in the skill sets required to manage knowledge once knowledge is codified (written). A qualified librarian / information manager is trained to deal with information/ records in different formats. Even back in the 80's when I attended library school, we were taught to deal with information in different formats not just to books. A information manager / librarian knows how to deal with a document , whether you call it "knowledge" or "information". In fact librarians spend many years in studies and work in perfecting their skills in organising these kind of documents whether it is IT skills, indexing and classification skills.
Admittedly though "Knowledge" is different from "information" in its acquisition. The acquisition of "knowledge" is usually through internal source. For example, agreements that a lawyer or team of lawyers in your firm have drafted, a research memo or a letter of advice. The acquisition of these precious documents are tedious and difficult. I would be the first to admit that this is not a job for the librarians.
Why not ask for help from a friendly librarian for the organisation of your collection of know-how ? You might be surprise what could be achieved with adequate briefing and support.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 19 November 2008 22:25 )
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