"I wish I was a lawyer in a Big City firm...."

The expression ‘Christmas clubbing’ has taken on a sinister new meaning this week as it has been revealed that several of the Big City law firms have outsourced their now annual cull of PUPs (Partners who Under-Perform) to mercenary gangs of Canadian seal clubbers from the Gulf of St Lawrence as a further cost-saving measure.

The opportunistic gangs are being paid handsomely for spiking literally scores of surprised and defenceless PUPs at their desks as they stare wide-eyed into their Inboxes.

Those that do not get clubbed are being noosed in a particularly dark technique known as ‘de-equitising’.

“Although it looks brutal, it is really quite quick and humane”, said one grateful survivor.

…but to cast aside and kill such noble and worthy creatures in this cynical way in the name of ‘profits per partner’ is surely short-termism gone mad.

So to draw attention to this shameful and pernicious practice and to provide continuity of employment for its unfortunate victims, we have launched the Red Snow Day Appeal to draw attention to their plight and to seek to provide them with the possibility of a home in the New Year.

City lawyers were asked to wear something red-and-white to demonstrate their support for the Appeal and, as only lawyers can do, they really got into the spirit of Christmas by donning festive Father Christmas outfits at their PCs.

Ironically, these self-same supporters were soon after asked to pack their Santa bags and were obliged to leave the building fast by any available exit in order to avoid the ministrations of the savage Christmas clubber gangs.

So if you know of a PUP who has taken a Christmas clubbing this year please tell them about the Red Snow Day Appeal…

…..and ask them to get in touch with us immediately.

(PS: Any head-hunters or recruiters responding to the Appeal will be required to donate their entire commission to the Red Snow Day Appeal– after all, it is Christmas.)

JOIN THE NEWS OF THE WORLD EMPLOYEE ACTION GROUP!

We have recently been contacted by a number of very concerned News of the World employees …or should we say ex-NoTW employees.

Rocked by yesterday’s shocking developments, News of the World employees are now not only acutely concerned for their immediate future, but are also distressed about the potential long term career damage that may suffer by being, as they see it, unjustly tainted by the acts of others.

News of the World employees are angered that they are effectively being scape-goated and punished when they have done no wrong.

Since they do not consider themselves to be at all responsible for the circumstances giving rise to the closure of the title, they are concerned to investigate the potential to claim Stigma Damages equivalent to those awarded in the BCCI litigation.

In response we have set up the News Of The World Employee Action Group, to provide co-ordinated and affordable support, advice and guidance for all News of the World employees through what will certainly be a troubling and distressing time for all concerned.  The initiative has been featured in The Lawyer and in The Financial Times.

If you are a News of the World employee, please register your interest now.

For an initial confidential conversation, without charge, please contact either:

Martin Donoghue       mdd@silvermansherliker.co.uk
Nicholas Lakeland     ncjl@silvernamsherliker.co.uk
Victoria Russell           vjr@silvermansherliker.co.uk

Tel: 020 7749 2700
www.silvermansherliker.co.uk

The Law is an App.

At least, trade mark law now is…

Three days ago, we launched our first mobile application for iPhone and Blackberry:  NameSearch TM Legal.

If you are reading this on an iPhone or BB, you can download the App free from the above link.

You can also read the review in the AppStore.

NameSearch TM Legal helps you protect your trade marks, business names, product names, logos and brands and is designed as a resource tool for brand consultants, creative agencies, designers, NPD specialists, marketing executives and entrepreneurs.

In addition to a constantly-updated feed on what’s happening in the world of brands and marks, you can also request free trade mark search reports on the legal availability of business and product names and free legal advice on names, logos, trade marks and brands from the IP Team at Silverman Sherliker LLP.

You also have the full text of the UK Trade Marks Act 1994 at your fingertips.

The journey from the dawn of the initial idea to its eventual launch in the Appstore has been a long and formative one and, like most journeys, it has taught me quite a lot.

This is what I have learned.

Lesson 1: When you want to generate a new idea …go large.

There are a lot of iPhone applications about trade marks and ‘matters legal’ but a lot of them just replicate legal statutes and provide very limited functionality. They are stuffy. They are basically just adverts.

I wanted to create a really useful tool for anyone involved in branding, trade marks, name creation, design, NPD or business start-ups. Something that would enable busy creatives and entrepreneurs to clarify the legal availablity of new trade marks, brands and designs ‘on the hoof’, as it were …in a taxi, at the water-cooler, from the white-hot centre of the brain-storming session. In short, I wanted it to deliver  something of real value for the creative and entrepreneurial community.

So what about an app that enables anyone in the world to request a free trade mark search and get an initial professional assessment of the results from their iPhone or Blackberry?

Okay. That’s not bad.

But what if people could also request free legal advice on branding and trade marks as well and request a fee quote for the registration of their chosen mark at the same time?

Better.

What about logos, graphics and designs? Could people take a quick snap of the logo or graphic with the iPhone camera and upload it from the app into our CRM database for immediate legal evaluation? ……er, yes….

So I think this is the most important part of the process.

Get excited. Ask yourself what would be the best thing you could possibly create…and then keep adding stuff.

Be demanding of yourself …and keep demanding.

Keep on asking yourself …. ‘Why not?’ …and ‘What if?’

So could we have improved on the first version of the app that we submitted to Apple?

Yes, we most definitely could. In fact, it was the initial and disappointing rebuff from Apple (more below) that drove us on to produce what we now think is a really fantastic application.

We hope that you will agree.

Lesson 2: Choose a good, professional iPhone App developer

Come on, guys! …We are lawyers, not tekkies!

Don’t skimp on the choice of a good developer.

Don’t just settle for the cheapest offer on eLance from Timbuktoo.

It makes much more sense, in my opinion, to pay the premium for having a good local developer who you can brief face-to-face and who is reasonably near to home when a few home-truths need to be shared. They will have a better understanding of your business and what you are trying to do if you can discuss the project with them across a table and they will probably come up with a much better look-and-feel for the new application as a result.

Include them in the conversation right from the beginning. What seems impossible and expensive to a work-a-day lawyer suddenly appears to be do-able.

I can whole-heartedly recommend my friends Ankush and Jason at PolydiamInfosoft. They are extremely dedicated and client-centric folk and showed great patience and fortitude in bringing this new app into being.

Great guys.

Lesson 3: (the big one) Never Give Up.

My Twitter friends know that this is a recurring Churchillian theme of mine and will forgive me. But there will be bumps in the road in any project. Sometimes they are big bumps that throw you off the road completely. We ended up in the proverbial ditch in March on this one:

The gestation period of this app has been 6 long months rather than the intended 2 months. The idea was conceived early one morning in December 2009, whilst shaving. I get a lot of good ideas whilst shaving. Developers were appointed and briefed in late December and we anticipated a launch in February. In fact, it was March 2010 before we were first in a position to submit the fledgling app to Apple Inc for assessment for inclusion in the AppStore.

Now, Apple Inc became very skittish in March 2010 for some unknown reason and suddenly started rejecting perfectly good applications on the flimsiest of pretexts, at least this is what I have managed to glean from various sources.

In short, our application was rejected because it, and I quote, ‘did not make full use of the available iPhone functionality’.

Well, stuff you, Duckie!

We found ourselves in the proverbial ditch.

So we went back to the drawing board with our developers, who were as frustrated as were we, and we started to build an even better application.

We incorporated the full text of the UK Trade Marks Act 1994.

We built in an RSS blog feed so that we could now offer bloggers on branding and design a further outlet for their blog-posts. We included a Twitterfeed.

We refined the back-end CRM databases to enable us to communicate with our enquirers by email and by SMS.

We upgraded the graphics and revisited the screen designs and the copy.

We resubmitted on June 9th and were notified of the inclusion of Namesearch TM Legal in the AppStore on June 15th….and great was the celebration.

In its first 3 days, and without any advertising apart from a few tentative tweets on Twitter, we have scored 164 downloads of our new application worldwide.

Interestingly, many of the initial enquiries are from Canada and the US so we will immediately be setting up a  referral conduit to our trade mark affiliates in those countries to handle those enquiries effectively.

NB: Don’t Miss Your Blog Opportunity

We are also looking for relevant blogs on marketing, branding and design to include in the application’s RSS feed so if you would like your blog included please do get in touch with me as soon as possible and we can help get you an increasing, targetted readership for all of your blog-posts.

Just email me at cjs@silvermansherliker.co.uk. We can include your blog in the Namesearch application within a few seconds and would be delighted to extend this courtesy to you. Don’t be shy!

May all your ideas be big ones.

I look forward to meeting you in the ditch.

(NB: NameSearch TM Legal has recently been updated for iPhone 4 and is available for download from the Appstore and from out new Trademark Registration web-site launched on 20th May)

Chris Sherliker

@London_Law_Firm
cjs@silvermansherliker.co.uk
Tel:  +44  (0)20 7749 2700

Silverman Sherliker LLP, 7 Bath Place, London EC2A 3DR

Yesterday, I was taken by the notion that I should acknowledge my 9000th Twitter follower with a blog-post, whoever he or she …or it …may be.

Serendipitous? Risky? ….Well, yes. After all, it may be a nutter or a liberal, a poker or golf freak or indeed a twitterbot. In all probability it would be.

Nevertheless, the die was cast. The rule was set.

I resolved to blog on follower 9000 whoever he, she or it turned out to be. No tricks. No poetic licence.

It was to be a gesture intended as a thankful celebration of the glorious and provoking arbitrariness of the Twitterverse.

The spotlight duly came to rest on @backstopp, of whom more later.

It could have been anybody.

In fact, it very narrowly missed being @GeneHunt of Ashes to Ashes fame  

(…”Now, that would have been one bastard of a blog-post – Eh! Bolly Knickers?”)

It would not have mattered who it was.

This is not to demean my blog guest, @backstopp. Heaven forfend!

It is simply to acknowledge that, in the Twitterverse, there is a law at play that seems to tolerate the most arbitrary of casual connections without impairing its own inexorable and constructive purpose.

It takes a while to realise that this is going on, but I can attest that it is so.

Indeed, if I was to be deliberately provocative I would say it really doesn’t matter what you tweet about, or with whom, you will soon be left ‘bouche be(acute)e’ by the network of coincidences and connections that will arise and be offered to you as if by some unseen hand. You cannot avoid them. That is why I am equally happy to engage in mad twitter burlesque or host virtual Twitter parties as I am to discuss serious matters legal. I have recognised that there is a law of synchronicity at play….and it is playful, but I believe the Universe as a whole is essentially playful so that does not surprise me much.

And before I am inundated by a deluge of  ’Law of Attraction’ tweets from the States, I would point out that it was Carl Gustav Jung who, in 1920, first coined the term ’synchronicity’ to explain the frequent occurrences of ‘meaningful coincidence’ that he attributed to ‘an acausal connecting principle’.

Jung would have loved Twitter. 

He tells the story of a woman who was recounting to him her dream involving a golden scarab when there was a repeated tapping on his study window that turned out to be a large and very rare scarab beetle that was clearly intent on entering the room. Spooky.

Then there is the case of the French Romantic, Emile Deschamps, who claimed in his memoirs in 1805 that he was once treated to some plum pudding by a stranger, one Monsieur Fontibu. A decade later, Deschamps ordered the plum pudding in a Parisienne restaurant to be told that the last portion had just been served to another customer who turned out to be the same M. Fontgibu. Many years later, Deschamps was served plum pudding and related the previous coincidence, adding that all that was needed now was for Monsieur Fontgibu to appear. At that moment, the elderly Fontgibu entered the room.

This kind of thing happens all the time on Twitter, of course.

It is a truly synchronous playground where, so often, so tirelessly and so appropriately, amazing and potent coincidences are conjured up by the creative principle, seemingly out of the very primeval twitter-froth itself. 

You can go hunting for these connections. The point is that you do not need to. Jump into the twitterstream; let go; have faith and see where it takes you. That is all.

So what of @backstopp?

Well, they have a stupendous technology that every company or organisation whose staff use lap-tops and other mobile data devices should definitely know about. Did you know that over 10,000 lap-tops are left in London taxis every year? If that happened to you, all of your personal data, passcodes, files would suddenly be out there for anyone to exploit. Backstopp by Virtuity enables organisations and individuals to perform a remote deletion of data files on any lost or stolen PC, Laptop, PDA or Mobile phone utilising either the GSM (mobile) network, Internet or RFID. As soon as you realise your device is lost or stolen simply login to the BackStopp web console to securely delete all data on the device using US Department of Defence standards. Once your data is secured a detailed report will show what data was destroyed, the device’s last known location and even a photo of the culprit.
 
How good is that!

The coincidence is that I was talking about this very technology just a short while back with another good twitter friend of mine Mike Briercliffe ( @mikejulietbravo).

Well, I say it is a coincidence…but on Twitter there is really no such thing.

Anyone fancy a party?