New blog from DPS director

A new blog has recently been started by Kevin Firth, a director of Computershare, the company behind the Deposit Protection Service. The blog is called The Letting Protection Service Blog. There are only a few entries so far, but one of them has a little video, so it looks as if Kevin will be using videos as well as written posts on the blog.

The Letting Protection Service (which I was not previously aware of) is a separate company (although still part of Computershare) offering various services to landlords, such as inventories, guarantees and tenant referencing.

Kevin says "Over the next few weeks, I’ll be using this blog to offer my own tips and advice". I wish him all the best for his new blog.

A top property blog!

Did you know, dear reader, that The Times have included this as one of their 25 top property blogs in their Friday Life and Style section?? I am very honoured. Their comments:

"Low on entertainment, but high on enlightenment. All buy-to-let landlords should make this a regular read."

That does rather sound as if they think I am a touch boring, which is a bit of a blow, but then I suppose I am a lawyer and therefore boring by definition. Still the rest of it is very flattering. Thank you . I will try to continue the enlightenment and perhaps sneak in a bit of entertainment along the way.

FIve legal housing/landlord & tenant law blogs

When I first started blogging in February 2006, there were only a few British legal blogs. For a while I think I was the only blogger covering housing/landlord and tenant law. However since then a few more have started up. I thought it would be nice to list them.

1. Nearly Legal
http://nearlylegal.co.uk/blog
This is my top pick. Started by an anonymous paralegal seeking a training contract (hence ‘nearly’ legal), it has developed into an authoritative source of housing law. During this time we have seen Nearly obtain his training contract and qualify as a solicitor, and he is now working as a housing lawyer in a ‘good’ London firm. Dissuaded from giving up his blog (claiming lack of time) by squawks of dismay from his devoted audience, the blog is now written and run by several specialist housing barristers and solicitors (including Nearly himself) and is, we understand, now citied in court hearings by Counsel and Judges. My favorite moment was a year or so ago, when a junior government minister posted a comment and Nearly thought it was someone playing a joke (it wasn't!).

2. The Painsmith Landlord and Tenant Blog http://painsmith.wordpress.com
This is a fairly recent housing blog, from specialist housing law solicitors PainSmith. However, it is a very welcome addition on the legal/housing blogosphere. The posts are always interesting, well written and accurate, and have often alerted me to points I had not previously been aware of. A highly recommended blog.

3. William Flack Blog
http://blog2.wflack.com
William Flack is a solicitor, and partner in Flack and Co, a small firm specialising in housing and social benefits law in London. William tends to write fairly long posts covering mostly social housing law.

4. Housed
http://rehoused.wordpress.com
A blog about housing law by a bloke doing legal aid housing law work. Posts are often fairly short and there is a lot of comment on working with the legal services commission (a thankless task, I gave it up ten years ago). There are also useful reference pages.

5. Ethan’s Snail in that legal bottle blog
http://ethans-way.blogspot.com
My fifth blog is named after that famous (to lawyers) negligence case. It is an interesting blog with some good posts, but I was distressed to see that nothing has been written since October last year. I was in two minds whether to include it, but have decided to leave it in, in the hope that he will start blogging again.

So thats the five. Six, including mine (the Landlord Law Blog, in case you have forgotten, the one you're reading now). If you know of any other housing/landlord and tenant legal blogs let me know and I will add them to my blogroll (NB I know there are some good property law blogs out there, but this list just covers tenancy law). I will take a look at the non lawyer sites another time.

Night falls on Night Jack blog

A chill wind is blowing through the halls of anonymous blogdom, after the High Courts decision that the writer of Night Jack, an anonymous police blogger who told it like it was, did not have the right to prevent The Times naming him.

I am in two minds about this. On the one hand, if you are employed and want to say truths that your bosses would rather keep hidden, you really have to go anonymous. On the whole, despite the whistleblower legislation, whistleblowers do not have a good track record of keeping their jobs. However whistleblowers often perform a valuable function in bringing to light matters in the public interest, so on the whole they are a Good Thing.

On the other hand, anonymous blogging can allow people to say things, unpleasant things, which they would not normally do in their real name, using their cloak of anonymity to make malicious and untrue statements and spreading false rumours, perhaps for personal gain. I don’t know of any instances where this has actually happened but I can see the potential. In view of the fact that things tend to hang around on the internet, buried in the search engines, for a long time, this is definitely a Bad Thing.

So where does the public interest lie? I suppose really it is on the side of the anonymous bloggers. There are very many anonymous blogs out there, many of them legal blogs, which, as well as being informative, are very entertaining, and the blogosphere would be much a poorer place without them.

Painsmith Blog

I have just discovered the excellent blog from Landlord and Tenant specialists Painsmith Solicitors. It has some really interesting posts, as one would expect, and I shall certainly be reading it in future. Highly recommended to anyone interested in landlord and tenant.

Tessa’s Travels – writings on Wordpress

Some of you may have noticed that from time to time I go ‘off topic’. This is because I like writing and do not always want to confine myself to strictly legal matters. However I have decided to hive off some of my more creative writing into a new site, which I have called Tessa’s Travels. This will contain all my writings about trips, holidays and visits to places interesting.

I decided to try a new blog platform for the new blog and have used Wordpress. This is fairly easy to use (particuarly if you have used Blogger before) and there are some very nice templates. I have used ‘Connections’ by Patricia Miller. This allows me to customise the header and has a nice (albeit fairly limited) collection of widgets.

So far using Wordpress seems to be pretty similar to Blogger but I must say that I am impressed with the Wordpress facilities for updating pictures (or media as they call it). I can decide where to put the pictures in the post (in Blogger I have to manualy move them), and there is a facility for me to put a caption and description. I have been putting cropped versions of my digital pictures into my blog for years, but the facilities offered by Wordpress allow me to make them more of a feature in the blog post. Which is very relevant for a travel blog! Although when I say travel, I suspect that most of our wanderings will be in Norfolk for the time being.

So from now on all travel type posts will be on Tessa’s Travels. However I still reserve the right to go off topic here in other respects. This is after all, my blog!

The Landlord Law Blog has now moved

As mentioned in my earlier post, there is now a new Landlord Law Blog, and therefore this is the last post here. The new blog can be found at www.landlordlawblog.co.uk. Please can you change any links you may have to this blog, and any RSS or other settings.

You can see what the new blog looks like from the picture, but please go and look for yourself.

www.landlordlawblog.co.uk

takeITon seminar

I attended an excellent seminar yesterday, which was provided free of charge by takeITon, a company offering free business IT support and advice to businesses in the East of England.

I sat next to Penny Lindop who designs cards and stantionary and who also runs a blog. She sells to shops but also sells online so do take a look at her website.

I also met Sally Clearly who is setting up an exciting new online community The Virtual Business Club. Sally is a very experienced marketeer and she told me that the club will have lots of new features to help members spot the Next Big Thing. She is offering a free years membership to the first 500 members (so she can populate the site) so I would suggest you get there quick!

Well thats enough blogging, I now have to review all my metatagsa and site links and implement a few google adwords!

Tenants Book

I’m writing a book. A book for tenants this time (I have already done one for Landlords - see left). Its coming along quite nicely, I have done over 40,000 words so far, but I thought having a blog I ought to use it to vent my angst from time to time, on writing niggles and so on. Otherwise why have a blog?

Mind you I am not going to tell you all about the book, I will tell you that when it is published (so it will be a nice surprise for you!). But it aims to help tenants through the minefields of residential landlord and tenant law.

I’m hoping to make it easy to understand and am trying to make my English as plain as I can. However it is difficult sometimes when you are a lawyer and legal phrases are second nature to you. I have to keep stopping myself and saying “they’ll never understand that, you will have to re-phrase that”. Which of course makes the book very wordy as most legal phrases are verbal shortcuts, so we can refer to complex concepts without having to explain them every time. Difficult.

Also I keep coming across nasty holes in the law where I cannot find the answer to questions I suspect tenants will expect to have answered. For example there is a common law implied covenant that rented properties will be fit for habitation on the first day of the tenancy, which only applies to furnished lets. But I cannot find any definition of what a furnished/unfurnished let actually is! Does 'unfurnished' mean no furniture at all? Does 'furnished' mean the furniture must be sufficient for the tenant to be able to move in and live in straightaway (for example have all necessary beds and chairs)? What about lets where only kitchen white goods are included?

I suspect there may be something on the Inland Revenue site about this and I will have to brace myself to take a look there. If you can help do leave a comment. I am sure that there must have been a case on this at some time.

More on the book later ...

Feed me!!

Eminent legal blogs have predicted that RSS will explode in 2007, so who I am to argue? We have now finally added a RSS feed to my Landlord-Law site, which gives links to new items recently uploaded.

Not without a certain amount of angst from me, as I continue to find this really simple technology a bit difficult to follow sometimes. However my web-designer Gill did admit that not all of it is really simple, which gives me some comfort (although perhaps she was just being polite).

I am now using RSS feeds on my Google personalised home page which means that I can easily view and keep up with news, legal blogs, and of course the Doctor Who news page and outpost Gallifrey! I find I use it all the time now, and have five tabbed paged of links!

There is also a feed for this blog which you should find right at the bottom of the screen if you scroll down. Although if you use Mozilla Firefox, the feed icon on your toolbar should go red and you will be able to subscribe by clicking that. This doesn’t work with the Landlord-Law feed though - I have no idea why not, another one of the 'really confusing' things about this 'really simple' system.

Blawg review #78

Congratulations to Justin Patten for an excellent overview of the blawgosphere (ghastly word) in his Blawg Review. If you want to find out who is blogging on legal matters, read this.

Oh, and thanks for the mention!

Twitter twitter, tweet tweet …

I have decided to go on to twitter. For those who don’t know what this is, it is one of those social networking sites from America. You sign up and then every now and then you do a tweet. This is a short statement of what you are doing. Like 'I am having a cup of coffee' or 'I have just put the washing into the machine'. Anyone who is interested can sign up to follow your tweets, and find out what you are tweeting about. And you can sign up to follow other peoples tweets.

Put like that it all sounds a bit silly. But I suppose fun. However, there is a bit of marketing in there (being a bit of an entrepreneur I have to think of marketing, it sort of goes with the job, not that I have a job being self employed …).

For example I have discovered this thing called twitter feed. This puts notes of entries of my blog onto my twitter page. So those following my tweets will know when I have blogged. Then I can (and have, you can see it if you look to the left) put a feed from my twitter page onto my blog. So people following my blog can see what I am twittering about. All pleasingly circular and possibly futile.

I haven’t found anyone to follow yet, apart from Nearly Legal. Being of a slightly more mature generation, none of my friends really do that sort of thing. Or at least I have not found any yet, although it is early days. The Nearly Legal tweets are all feeds from the NL web-site, some of which seem to be reports of my postings on my blog. Which of course I already know about, having done them (and of course they are also reported on my twitter page). More circularity.

So what will I twitter about? I will probably use it to tell the world what I am doing on the Landlord-Law site, what new items have been loaded up and the like. I will probably also tweet about work related things I have done, such as talks, conferences etc. And I will probably from time to time just answer the question on the twitter text box, which is 'What are you doing?'. Which at the moment is writing this blog.

Nerdy stuff

Visiting the Amazon associates central website the other day after a long absence, I was excited to see that they now have some intriguing new ‘widgets’. The most useful for me is the ‘my favourites’ widget, a customizable box you can put on your web-site containing selected books, and your own comments on each book. Once you have set the box up and put it online, you can then alter it via the Amazon site, for example by changing the books.

I have put one on this blog, in the side bar, featuring all the books I have mentioned in posts. It will now be much easier to add new books, than via the individual entry for each book I did before.

I have also done lots of ‘favourites’ boxes on my Landlord-Law site (I don’t call them that, you can change the text at the top). Its great because I can recommend books which relate to the content of the page. More of a service to readers really than a money earning exercise - I think my average earnings are about £10 per quarter so it is hardly a get rich quick exercise.

But there is more. I can now put links in the text like this (hover your mouse, it is supposed to make a box pop up, but even if it doesn't it will still link to the book). Cool eh? You need an ASIN for that – I had to go to the ever helpful Wikipedia to find out what that was, and how to locate it (it is the ISDN number for books).

Other widgets include a slide show and product cloud, but I don’t like them as much, so will leave them for the time being.

Still, hours of innocent fun to be had. Why not try it - you too could earn a few pence extra per day! Oh, and here's a banner:



Of course your links depend on the Amazon site working properly. So if none of the above are showing - its not my fault!

Five things

To those who do not know, there is this sort of tag thing going around, I do not know where it came from, but UK legal bloggers are all tagging each other to tell 5 things about themselves that others don’t know about, and then tag 5 other bloggers. I have been tagged by two sites, Impact and Family law.

I don’t mind telling 5 things about myself you probably didn’t know, if you don’t mind reading them. Here goes:

1. In the late 1980s I took a year out to travel and spent about 7 months in Mexico. I learnt Spanish and stayed on a farm and had a great time. I have forgotten a lot of the Spanish but I expect I could get it back if I tried (although my language ability is about moron level, I learned at about half the speed of everyone else).

2. I originally studied geography (at Hull University) – at that time I no more thought that I would end up a lawyer than go to the moon (law students were sad people who spent most of their time on the second floor of the Brynmor Jones library). I am still interested in environmental matters, as you can see from much of this blog

3. After Hull, I went for teacher training, but gave it up after teaching practice, as the prospect of spending the rest of my life trying to teach 15 year olds who did not want to learn geography, was to awful to contemplate. Best decision of my life (almost).

4. I don't like potatoes. This means that a fish and chip supper is a bit of an unbalanced meal for me. Everyone always assumes that everyone likes potatoes as a matter of course.

5. I don’t drive. When I was young I couldn’t afford it. Now I’m older I am too scared to learn. Its not a real problem though. What you have never had you don’t miss, and it is of course better for the planet. Besides, my husband is a much better driver than I could ever be.

The second stage of the tagging exercise is a bit of a problem as I think most of the bloggers I know of have already been tagged. Still here goes. Corporate blawg, Legal spy, Terminological Inexactitudes, Head of Legal, and the Criminal Solicitor. All good blogs.