Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Lex Evangelist listed on Blawg

My Blog got listed on the the Blawg which maintaines good directory of Legal Blogs from around the world.

Draw Flowcharts, Charts, etc

DrawAnywhere is an online diagramming website, where you can draw, modify and share flowcharts and other diagrams, with the look & feel of a desktop application. It runs on any browser with Flash 9 installed. There is no need to download and install any custom software. It runs entirely on the web, and thus it is an always-on-access-anywhere solution. It meets all your diagramming needs without installing, maintaining and purchasing expensive software.

Main benefits
  1. Draw Flowcharts, Process diagrams, Organizational charts and more.
  2. Login from anywhere and modify your diagram.
  3. Share your diagram with others.
  4. Export your diagram as an image file (jpg, png etc) or a pdf file.
  5. No software to download and install. You just need a web browser with Flash player

Opening up of Legal services in India



AS India slowly but surely opens up every possible sector to the foreign market, how can the legal services be left behind. For this an interactive session was called by the Ministry of Law on 17 September 2007, to which I also went the session lasted about two hours, in the end three groups emerged

1. Those in against

2. Those in favour
3. Undecided



Group 1 comprises of big law firms who hold substantial market share, and are not willing to give up .
Group 2 as imagine comprises of those firms who already are in MoU with foreign firms and are trying to strengthen their position.
And finally the Group 3 who comprises of those people who were undecided, really don’t care , there for free snacks.

After the session was conclude, all the view points were noted by the ministry, and they would come up with a draft within few months.

I guess as the world economies open up, and the competition comes to domestic market. Talking of legal services in particular one metaphor come to mind " Never to put horse behind the cart " Opening up of legal services should been taken in steps, so when the competition comes we will be ready to face them. At present lot of handicaps crumble the legal services. Let us take a look

Firstly, under the Advocates Act,1961 foreign firms and lawyers are not allowed to practice in India, It is a common misconception the foreign firms and lawyers will come and take over the litigation practice from Indian lawyers which as anyone who can read can see this is not the case as being made out.

Indian Partnership Act, 1932 bars law firms from having more than 20 lawyers, this limits a law firm to grow in size.

Limited Liability Partnership Bill, 2006 is still sitting to be passed in the Parliament, this act will provide a law firm to expand and compete globally.

A set of guidelines which will govern the activities of foreign firms and lawyers. For example in Singapore, foreign firms can only practice in banking and corporate areas of Singapore law.

Given above reasons it is now for the government to act upon them and show us the door and we will walk through it whatever the outcome.

Sunday, October 28, 2007

On-line Translation services

If you have text or a web site in a foreign language and want to know what it means in English, try Free Translation
or
Babelfish.
They are freebie too.

Have you erase your data completely ?

A University of Glamorgan study found more than half the hard drives they saw still contained sensitive information.
It is feared some of the information could be used by criminals.
The Information Commissioner's Office, which monitors data disposal, has said it will be tough on any organisations breaching the Data Protection Act.

The study examined 105 hard drives which had been purchased on internet auction sites and was able to access 92 of them.

The data recovered by the university team included staff passwords and national insurance numbers, a template to print a university degree and even detailed information about school children.

Researchers found 57% of the readable disks contained data which allowed the original owners - ranging from organisations in the leisure and financial services industries to a number of universities - to be identified.

A fifth of the disks contained financial information, including sales receipts and profit and loss reports.

But as with every problem there is a solution, Here is one that will securely erase a single file, a folder, or an entire hard drive:http://www.softpedia.com/get/Security/Secure-cleaning/Eraser.shtml

Free PDF tools

I have found this site that offers you tools to edit your pdf file as you like.
PDFill PDF Tools are FREE PDF Toolbox to Merge, Split, Reorder, Encrypt, Decrypt, Rotate, Crop, Reformat, Header, Footer, Watermark, Images to PDF, PDF to Images, Form Fields Delete/Flatten/List, and PostScript to PDF.