Legal Research

A July Pot Pourri

By Simon Chester

These news items likely aren’t worthwhile putting as separate posts, so this is a silly season round-up of odd notes from the legal media.

We’re Staying in Dayton

Despite what we speculated last year about the outsourcing of jobs from Dayton, Lexis told the local paper last week that it has no plans to move and that 3,000 jobs in town are safe.

Amazing ROI in Legal Publishing

Want to quadruple your money in 55 months? Sounds like a Madoff line.

Well, in 2004, a London fund put £750,000 of fund money into a Lexis spin-off, a MBO divested company called Tottel Publishing – which describes itself as “a traditional, but cutting-edge publisher of high quality books and information services for lawyers, accountants and business professionals”. On Friday it sold Tottel Publishing to Bloomsbury Publishing, the publishers of the Harry Potter novels, for £10m (?11.7m). The fund made £3m, in just over four years. Tottel employs 27 staff, with annual turnover of £6.2m, which has grown around 80 per cent since investment.

That means revenues of Canadian $434,000 per employee.

By contrast Random House’s parent Bertelsmann reported annual income of 16,118 million Euros but with staff over 100,000. That’s Canadian $246,000 per employee. And profit margins in legal publishing are significantly higher, with none of the astronomic advances, marketing expenditures and returns from book stores that conventional publishers face.

The Least Read Piece in the Paper

I know community newspapers are just aching to fill space but the latest issue of the Bahama Journal has a column with the weirdest title that august journal must ever have seen: [I'm not making this up] – Incorporeal Hereditaments? Easements and their Mode of Operation; Land Law and Conveyancing By Clement Chigbo

Here is a random paragraph:

We also say that easements are appurtenants or appendants or pertinents to property in that they are ancillary to the use and essential to the enjoyment and use of the property to which they are “attached”. There are different kinds of easements depending on their mode of creation, eg ranging from express grant, implied grant, express reservation, implied reservation, prescriptive easement or easement by prescription to statutorily created easements. These are the modes of creation of easements and servitudes.

If you’ve endured that, you deserve a reward:

A Monday Fillip

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on July 06, 2009 (boomark / email).