What's a personality?

So on Thursday I'm off to York for the Press Business awards - where I'm shortlisted for Business Personality of the Year. Which feels somewhat bizarre. The interview process was lunch with the judges, and the challenge was to appear dynamic and interesting, and all good things - though, since I have a width of interests and things I get involved in, it felt like relaying a CV including bits where the good Mrs B later said "Oh no, you didn't tell them about that" - 17th century radical religious sects, that kind of thing.

Are we all just childen in our own eyes? And these business awards - playing a game?

A lot has changed...

I've had a blogging hiatus but much has changed at Berwins - we have tried to put in place much better management, set some aspirational goals and think we have the bits in place for growth.

Whilst not having 15 points deducted to kick start us, like some, and not being in the Third Division to start with, we are pretty confident that we have a good model for sustainable growth which should benefit all our people - so http://berwin.co.uk should be getting livelier

And the triathlon season has finished so it's mainly running - can I do sub 45 for the Abbey Dash?

What makes lawyers diferent?

Do all lawyers try to do te same thing, making it impossible to differentiate them? Some may do - but as lawyers we are stuck in the middle of the vortex and maybe it's difficult so see the differences. There may be differences in personal style, skills. We can use tag lines and slogans, but they have to mean something, and we have to deliver on them. There is no point claiming we are entirely different, if we can't be. There is a point in showing we delivere service better, if we demonstrably do. Is it demonstrable? This is a constant challenge.

In the meantime running too fast is bad for your legs, sometimes. But it's fun ...

Brass monkeys and the law as business

After struggling with a bit of an injury since the Robin Hood Marathon in Nottingham in September, I managed to do the training and turn up to do the Brass Monkey Half Marathon in York last weekbend - by gum it were brassy. It's supposed to be fast and flat, but at 1 hr 41 mins I was not at the fastest I've been, so back to the interval running for me. In the meantime, and not least for consideration whilst running - how should law firms operate? We run as partnerships, whereas our commercial clients are companies with a distinction between shareholders, who share in profits, and directors, some of whom manage the business. And the key mananger may be neither. At Berwins we are working on ways to run ourselves as a business, and working on a corporate model is one of the challenges. Breaking down traditional expectations is of course another. We are going to move to describing ourselves and then treating ourselves as directors, managers and shareholders; keep reading...

It's so easy to copy - so don't do it

The world wide web has made so much material availabe - and in writing - that copying is the easiest thing. It's also still a breach of copyright. Bizarrely we discovered that the home page of our website was reproduced word for word on another firm's site. Should we sue? Nah. We want to keep our site fresh, so we have moved ours on, and told the other firm. To be fair, they may not be responsible for the wording - it may have come from another source, such as a PR company writing their material - but they would still be liable if their wording went up second. Of course it is also possible that theirs went up first, since this particular wording was offered to us as original material. Our lesson - we will write our own material...

Chinese herbs, needles and running injuries

Goodness knows what works - stabbing a needle into my knee seems a bit savage, and of course seems to have no effect. Particularly since the Chinese doctor didn't ask anything about the injury, how it came about etc. Some physio from Pam Smith at the Horsforth practice might do it, since she at least understands the strains. Still not able to run much, and there's the Brass Monkey Half Marathon on 21 January to gear up for - and in May, two teams from top law firm Berwins http://www.berwin.co.uk should have two relay teams in the Leeds Half Marathon Corporate Challenge. Very good at law too...

Fancy e-mail headers

Having told the firm which had the e-mails with fancy e-mail headers, they said they had had the problem only once before and blamed our spam filters - but I'm not sure that's right. They will have been told that this problem doesn't occur when they bought the product which produced the headers.

In any event, we won't use them