HUMAN LAW MEDIATION

The Prince Charles litigation gives us three useful lessons

The current litigation involving Prince Charles and the Mail on Sunday is understandably attracting media interest. Prince Charles is taking legal action against the newspaper for publishing parts of a private journal which was stolen from his offices. This journal relates to when he attended the Hong Kong hand over ceremony to China in 1997.

Last week media coverage focused not just on the content of the journals but mainly on the fact that a damaging witness statement signed by a former senior employee of the Prince, Mark Bolland. This said that Prince Charles viewed himself as a "political dissident" and appeared on behalf of the newspaper.

If I can give my observations:

1) On the face of it litigation in an open Court is a very risky business but Prince Charles has to bring this case as the Mail on Sunday has seven more royal journals where the Hong Kong one came from, and is longing to print them. This litigation(which is an application for summary judgment so may not be settled now) is going to decide whether the Mail is going to publish the 7 more journals which it acquired in such interesting circumstances.

2) If you read the Times & Telegraph on Saturday, you would have seen that the litigation managed to unite the left wing columnist, Alastair Campbell and the right wing Charles Moore in their condemnation of Mark Bolland. As Alastair Campbell wrote about Prince Charles "He is in a prominent public position and entitled to the basic trust and loyalty of people in whom he places his own trust and loyalty. He must be left ruing his character judgment today."      

3) Public figures may now be afraid to go to the Press Complaints Commission - The current chairman of the PCC is Sir Christopher Meyer, the former ambassador to the United States who published memoirs which to many, breached confidences with politicians and leading public figures. As Campbell writes " Now that he has shown such disregard for discretion, vital in such a bridging role, I find it hard to see anyone other than those on the media side of the bridge should trust him."

Recommended resource - The Online Guide To Mediation

It remains a fact that United States law blogs number far more than those within the United Kingdom and are far more diverse.

An example of this is the fact that within the United States you even have an alternative dispute resolution weblog.

The Online Guide to Mediation offers information, news, and commentary on mediation, negotiation, law, and conflict management. It contains a variety of interesting posts.   

Recommended Counsel - Charles Apthorp of 5 Essex Court

As solicitors we will sometimes find ourselves instructing barristers to provide a second opinion on a case or to represent our clients in Court or in mediation.

One barrister that I do recommend is Charles Apthorp of 5 Essex Court, Temple, London.

Charles works for the chambers of Simon Freeland QC and his area of expertise include Commercial Litigation, Human Rights and Public Law.

From a recreational point of view, he was part of the British Olympic Sailing Squad 1982 - 1992 and a Flying Fifteen World Champion 2001.

I became aware of Charles as a result of a client of mine being on the opposite side to him and having a very difficult time of it. The client was very keen to instruct him when it found itself in another dispute.

Recently we were doing a not uncomplicated case and he showed two primary skills namely a capacity to dominate a room full of lawyers and an ability to assimilate a great deal of information within a short space of time.   

Childhood bullying - We reap what we sow

A story in the Guardian refers to a victim of childhood bullying now aged 23, receiving a £20,000 payout from Torfaen Council in South Wales; she suffered years of verbal and physical abuse at primary school.

This will not be the first time that a Council will face a legal action from a former pupil at school nor will it be the last.

As the Guardian writes, bullying is one of the main issues facing young people- A recent Ofsted report stated that headteachers have growing concerns about worsening pupil behaviour, with 50% of schools saying gang culture was a key theme.

A significant point for me is that Ms Amos has still not resolved her childhood issues. She says "I don't leave the house in case I see the bullies from school. I hate the way I am, but I can't change it."

The issues of trauma have not been resolved.

Legislation does not necessarily represent a solution as well - A spokesman for the Welsh Local Government Association observed "Councils have a statutory duty to safeguard the well being of children under the 2004 Children Act and they take this responsibility very seriously."

A real difficulty is that Councils (like all of us) have to be concerned with so much legislation now. Do you honestly think that regulation and law can deal with gang culture?            

How to save yourself £50,000 in legal fees

Recently I was acting for a client in a commercial litigation dispute which went to mediation.

The case was reasonably complex and had been dragging on for at least two years with no end in sight with legal proceedings about to be issued if the mediation failed.

The mediation worked and the case settled on the day. I would estimate my client saved £50,000 in legal fees together with avoiding the time and stress of being stuck in litigation with the inherent risks that involves.

Some observations:

1 Mediation does tend to work. The vast majority of mediations do settle cases.

2 In this instance, if the lawyers had their way the case would not have settled. As lawyers we have a role to protect our clients, but sometimes we can act as part of the problem rather than the solution. What was integral in settling case was splitting the lawyers from the clients and the clients sorting the matter amongst themselves.

3 A potential barrier to lawyers settling cases is that they can identify too strongly with their clients. This is laudable but can cloud objectivity. A real problem can be if you accept everything your client says, it will undermine the chance of settlement being reached. The key is to retain objectivity.

UK law blogs continue to expand

Congratulations to Tessa Shepperson who has just started posting with the Landlord Law Blog. Previously I had posted about the lack of United Kingdom law blogs dealing with non Intellectual Property disciplines. With the recent addition of Family Lore and now the Landlord Law Blog, we are seeing more variety with the UK law blogs.

Tessa is a Solicitor and editor of the Landlord-Law web-site and deals with residential landlord and tenant law. The website was shortlisted for the Law Society Gazette Century Awards 2003, best use of IT category. In light of this, I am sure that Tessa will make a success of her blog.

Technology firms - How ethical are you?

It is not been a good week for the technology firms with U.S. legislators attacking at Google Inc. and other prominent Internet companies on Wednesday because of the companies alleged complicity in human rights abuses by the Chinese government.

Over the past year Yahoo has given at least two of its clients to the Chinese thought police. We are also aware that Microsoft and Google will "co-operate" with what the Chinese government thinks its people should see or read on the internet.

As representatives from Google, Yahoo Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. looked on, lawmakers from both political parties delivered a withering attack.

"Your abhorrent activities in China are a disgrace. I simply do not understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night," said Rep. Tom Lantos, the ranking Democrat on a House International Relations subcommittee on human rights.

Perhaps the US Congress should be a little careful in being too critical of the Chinese because as a result of its massive trade deficit with China, the Chinese have $250 billion invested in Treasury bonds. Effectively the Chinese are lending the Americans money and if it will pulled the plug, it could send the US financial system haywire.

With respect to the technology companies, Keith Woolcock of the Telegraph provides an illuminating piece.

Here are some of the reasons why technology firms are investing in China:

• Currently there are 110m internet users in China, out of a population of 1.3 billion. By comparison in the West, internet penetration is over half the population.
• The Chinese only spend about 0.3pc of their gross domestic product on advertising, compared with 1.3pc in the US and in other Western countries.
• Google earns 99pc of its revenue from advertising.

As Woolcock writes "Each company can tart their actions up with arguments about a lesser of evils, or taking a course for the greater good, but reality is that dollars and cents has always been the alpha and omega of business, not ethics."

Podcast - Government set to update 16 year old computer crime act

In this podcast, I consider the government plans to update the Computer Misuse Act. To view an introduction to podcasting, please consider this link.

To listen to the podcast, please click this file:

Download cyber_crime.mp3

Blogosphere continues to expand

According to David Sifry, head of Technorati who has just posted his quarterly report on the world of blogs, the blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was three years ago, and is doubling in size every 5.5 months, on average.

One of the key problems is how to easily find the most interesting blogs on the subjects that you care about. Technorati has tried to get around this by launching Blog Finder, a tags-based way for people to find the most authoritative blogs on a particular subject, allowing bloggers to tag their blogs into the categories that they felt were most relevant for themselves. 

Message to Chief Executives - Destroy your own business

An interesting article within the current Fortune magazine relates to Steve Jobs(pictured left), the CEO of Apple Computer Inc and his approach to business success.

Essentially Mr Jobs uses two different models to develop his business. As Fortune write "Apple's trick has been not just its game-changing tech breakthroughs (music and computers made easy) but its relentless push to disrupt itself before others have a chance to do so....Think about the iPod here: The first one released four years ago had a monochrome screen and a five-gigabyte hard drive. Now it has a colour screen and a 60-gigabyte hard drive at roughly the same price. What other business would obsolete a successful product like the iPod mini after only 18 months to introduce the nano?"