Proctor in Admiralty

What happened to Equasis?

Update to post below: Equasis is back on line.  According to the US Coast Guard, Equasis was having a dispute with its hosting company.  It appears to be resolved and most importantly, Equasis is back online.  I also learned that the popularity of the service is growing all of the time.  I will try to get some statistics on this to report back.

What happened to Equasis, the online database of more that 7500 vessels around the world?  That is the question on the mind of many and I note the comments posted to my orignal entry on Equasis back in May, 2005.  That post is here. 

So far, I haven't been able to find out.  As many of you know, the website is down and they are not answering the telephone in the Equasis head office in Paris - I have called numerous times. 

I am trying to get an update from the US Coast Guard, one of the sponsors of the Equasis project and I will update all of you as soon as I have more information.

For those interested Equasis was an acronym for the European Quality Shipping Information System - I didn't know that until today!

Until more information is available,  if anyone knows of an alternate source of that great data available previously available on Equasis.org, please post a comment here. 

Legal tech, tips and training guru

My friend Adriana Linares is blogging about Legal Technology tips at I Heart Tech.  I have known Adriana since she consulted and trained at my old law firm, and helped bring us from a world of Wordperfect and Groupwise to the Microsoft Office suite.

She is smart, talented and cute - not to mention, she knows her way around a computer.

Her posts have included useful tidbits including, free software for syncing files across multiple computers - here and a free desktop viewing tool, here.

Add her feed, you will not be disappointed.

By the way, thanks to Tom Mighell at Inter Alia, for bringing Adriana's blog to my attention!

Wiki legal dictionary and encyclopedia

Thanks to Tom Mighell at Inter Alia, for pointing out Wex, a new collaborative legal dictionary/encyclopedia from the Cornell University Law School Legal Information Institute, in and of itself, one of the greatest free legal research tools available.

As the folks at Cornell describe it, Wex is:

an ambitious effort to construct a collaboratively-created, public-access law dictionary and encyclopedia. It is sponsored and hosted by the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell Law School. Much of the material that appears in Wex was originally developed for the LII's "Law about..." pages, to which Wex is the successor.

As Mighell points out, the contents are currently small, but this has the potential to become a great resource to the legal community.  The site is not open to editing by the public, as Wikipedia is, but they are looking for editors.

I tried out a few different searches, and got this nice summary under Admiralty. 

 

Why MindManager is part of my daily life

After introducing a former partner of mine, Saunders Aldridge to Mindjet's MindManager 6 Pro, he commented that I should be telling the maritime world about this great product.  I am happy to oblige, but also want to take this opportunity to push Saunders to start his own blog (in discussion for more than a year) to cover IT issues for medium sized law firms. There you go Saunders, I have laid down the gauntlet, and I look forward to your blog to be launched on . . .

Now, on to MindManager.   Mindjet's MindManager 6 Pro is a software version of a mind map.  Mind mapping is a graphic representation of how ideas are linked together.  Often used in brainstorming, the mapping idea can be used just with a pen and paper to create and visualize the link between concepts.  An example of a hand-drawn mind map is here. 

For more on mind mapping, go here.  For courses on mind mapping, check out Tony Buzan (who is credited with coining the term if not creating the concept).  Lawyers use mind maps every day, whether they think about it or not.  We constantly link 1 idea to the next, sometimes graphically, sometimes just in our notetaking or in outlining.  Using MindManager gives you a powerful outlining tool that displays the relationship graphically and more. I use it every day for almost every list that I create.  You add text and create relationships between items on the fly.  You can create to do lists that link back to Outlook, link files, and webpages, attach notes and much more.

I use a master map which I use as a dashboard for my daily life.  I understand (but I have not yet tried) Gyronix, increases the dashboard concept through MindManager with a product called ResultsManager and I will report back on that in the future.

I took notes using the software during "break-out" sessions at my company's last managment retreat.  I was able to capture what the group discussed and then it aided us in presenting back to the larger management team at the end of the session.  It is great for presentations and you can export into PowerPoint slides.  It is so much more however.  If you create a graphical map, and then want to use the infomation as a traditional outline for creating a brief or for any other purpose, it is no problem to export the text into Word (or even excel). 

The software seems to work very well with the whole Microsoft Office Suite exporting (or importing) information is only a quick click away.  You can also export maps as PDF files.  Mindjet also runs a blog, with interesting tidbits of information on the company, using their software, examples of mind maps and more.

One unfortunate point is the cost of the software.  A single license runs $349.00 and volume discounts do not kick in until 25 copies.

However, there is a 21 day free trial of the full blown software, so check it out.  I think you will find it is worth the price.

Last minute addition - I noted that Mindjet has teamed up with the BlawgThink 2005, an conference being put together by two of the great legal bloggers: Matt Homann of the non-billable hour and Dennis Kennedy, the techno-lawyer/consultant, (his blog is here)  as a followup to their sucessful LexThink conference last year in Chicago.  All attendees are receiving a complimentary license of MindManager 6 Pro and Gyronix ResultsManager with their paid attendance.  That is $635 worth of software if you attend a $595 conference - WOW! I am not sure if I ever heard of such a good deal and that's not counting the excellent information you are going to receive from some of the biggest names in legal blogging.  If you have the time to attend, you might want to reserve a spot before they are all gone.

 

 

Google tools that are great for lawyers

As a devoted user of most things Google, I was surprised to find that I was unaware of a one of their not-so-new products, that can be useful for attorneys - Google Scholar.  Google Scholar is a search engine that only searches scholarly papers for your topic.  on a recent test, I googled "COGSA" on Scholar. (the acronym for the Carriage of Goods by Sea Act- for non-maritime readers 46 USC App. 1300 et seq. for those who must know!)  I got 16 scholarly articles back with titles such as "Conflict of Laws and the Contractual Rule of Bills of Lading" and "A Piece - Neither a Package nor a Unit".  Only 1 result was off-topic for me and apparently there is something called a Core Geometry Selection Aid or CoGSA for short - to aid magnetic designers in the selection of a core geometry - right over my head!

After mentioning this tool to a colleague, I quickly learned that a lot of people don't realize that Google offers many tools in addition to the basic search engine that made them famous.

A quick run down:

Email - Gmail is a great free email application, with a unique way of keeping email threads together. You get 2.5 gigs of storage so you basically never have to delete an email again!

Digital Photos - I index, manipulate, order prints and send copies of  all of my photos using Picassa.  You will never have to search through dozens of folders for the digital photo you are looking for again.

Translation - Google has a language tool application to help translate German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese and Korean to and from English.  This is a great tool for maritime lawyers especially, as we always seem to deal with some documents written in a foreign language.

News - Here are three services that I use regularly.  First of all, Google News aggregates news from 4500 news services and lays them out in an easy to read home page, plus it is search-able.  Second, you can customize the News page to always show the results of a search on your home page.  Third, you can use the Google Alerts feature to run your search and send the results to you as an email as often as you like.  Think of this as a free clipping service.  I have several searches set up in Google Alerts that I use for monitoring the maritime industry as well as anything published about the company I work for.

Maps and Directions  - okay Google Maps blows Mapquest out of the water.  It combines directions, mapping and satellite imagery in one tool.  Check it out the next time you need directions.

I am sure there are many other useful Google Tools - including the controversial Google Desktop - which indexes your hard drive and makes it search-able (for you)  through the Google interface.   These are just the ones that I use regularly and that I think can be very helpful to the maritime practitioner.

I am sure that many of you were aware of some or all of these tools - if there are others that you use regularly, or you have better ones in mind, plese post your comments and let me know what works for you.

The benefits of Equasis.org

While speaking with a fellow member of the Maritime Law Association of the United States last week during one of the cocktail parties held during the Association's May meetings, the subject turned to the benefits of using the Equasis website.  While we both believe the site is widely used by maritime lawyers, I felt that it was worth mentioning here just in case some of you had not heard of it.

Equasis is a free to use  information system that was developed initially by the European Commission and French maritime administrations to collect and publish safety related data concerning vessels, their owners and operators.   Information is collected from both public and private sources and covers most commercial vessels sailing today.

Current sources of data include: port state control regimes, classification societies, the International Group of P&I Clubs, Intertanko, Intercargo, the International Ship Manager's Association, Lloyd's Register Fairplay and numerous others.

Governmental entities that participate in providing information include, the maritime administrations of the European Commission, France, Spain, the United Kingdom and Japan and the United States Coast Guard.

Data available includes the name of the vessel, type of vessel, year of construction, flag,  gross tonnage, name and address of the registered owner, name and address of the operator, certificate information including P&I and hull underwriter information, as well as a list of all violations, the date, location and nature of that violation.

Much of this detailed  information can be very useful to maritime attorneys in a variety of ways and is the only source known at this time that provides this level of information for free.  All that is required is for the user to complete a  registration form.

Blogging behind the wall

Discussions abound regarding knowledge management and the use of technology to make the information more readily available.  One of my partners recently attended TechShow 2005, and came back talking about blogging behind the firewall, but could not elaborate much on the concept. . . there is a great post from Feedmelegal referencing an article this seems to discuss this concept more fully.  It include this quote which sums up the concept:

"A well-designed blawg can serve as a critical document-management tool for organising and archiving legal information. The very act of trading relevant links and useful ideas electronically, via blog posts and reader response, captures crucial matter-related content automatically, rendering it searchable and browsable. ... the firm acquires a valuable, annotated repository, user-friendly and equally accessible to individual lawyers, internal practice groups ... and organisational departments ... . Not incidentally, both productivity and information exchange increase through better time management and resource allocation."

Imagine creating a blog within particular practice groups, or even across more general areas such as what might affect all litigators or all attorneys in a firm who work on an industry team - if you have such things.  Keeping it behind the firewall, allows for the freeflow of ideas, and the trading of a firm's collective brainpower for the purpose of others within the firm.  If everyone who uses it can post, maintenence is essentially non-existent (very important as it would not be used if it was time consuming to maintain or add a post.)

This could prove to be a more profitable use of blogging within the legal community than as the form of communication with the outside world.

An interesting new blog

I just found an interesting new blog - Jim Calloway's Law Practice Tips Blog.  He just launched it on Sunday.  Already he has posted several interesting tips.  Good luck Jim.