But we had a good case, a REALLY good case. It was my first medical negligence case. Medical negligence cases are very complicated. Proving that one thing caused another and that that ultimately led to what is complained of can be tortuously difficult, involving a lot of investigation, research and expert evidence.

One of the features of medical negligence is that multiple parties may be responsible. In this case, there had been a medical procedure. The patient had originally gone to one doctor. In fact another doctor had performed the procedure. The procedure had been performed in a hospital.

So when you go to sue in a case like this you must sue the first doctor, this is the person with whom the contract to do the job has been made. You must sue the second doctor, this is the person who actually did the job. And you must sue the hospital as the organisation responsible for overseeing how all of this was done.

But before you rush off suing anybody, when you have multiple parties in a case like this, you must write to each and say: “look, this is clearly wrong and my client has suffered loss because of your fault, admit it now and there’ll be no need for anybody to sue anybody else. But if you don’t admit it I’ll have to sue you and these other people and if these other people turn out not to have been at fault, we’ll have to hold you responsible for their costs of the whole thing as well as ours.” Or words to that effect…

That’s a really important letter to send. And I sent it; to each of them. A little while later I got a phone call. From a very senior and established solicitor acting for the hospital. We didn’t know each other from Adam and to him I would have been a mere pipsqueak. But he was all avuncular and charming and he wanted to offer me a bit of friendly advice. He gave me a tip, he said if you want to get a quick settlement name the first doctor first in the proceedings.

You see the letter is sent before the proceedings are issued. When you issue the proceedings you name the parties in no particular order but that order is then fixed as the title of the proceedings for their duration. And a matter of practical fact, if you have proceedings entitled Flor McCarthy v Boy Dewy, Totally Chetham and Any Howe it will appear in every court list as “McCarthy v Dewy and others”. The first named defendant is the one everyone will hear about. My friendly colleague was suggesting if I put the doctor in the limelight, he or she will be particularly anxious to keep their name out of the papers and will use whatever influence they may have to get the case settled as soon as possible.

Such helpful advice, from such a senior practitioner; a real inside tip. So I rang the senior counsel I had at the time, a very experienced and supremely competent man (also a real gentleman). He said Florence, he always called me Florence (still does), when I was a newly qualified barrister a then senior counsel who later became a judge took him aside and said “you are very able and very well qualified, you will be much sought after in this business and many people will come to you looking for you to be their advocate. But never compromise on your principles and never let the prospect of gain cloud your judgment.”

He didn’t really need to say anymore. The helpful advice that I was getting from my senior colleague had one salient feature. He was acting for the hospital. He did not want his client’s name appearing all over the court lists and in the media as a result. So he was trying to get me to name one of the other defendants first to deflect attention away from his client.

It was one piece of advice that I declined.

This one was using the Twitter egg as his avatar. I am always suspicious of anyone using Twitter as the egg or the bird, to me it signifies either somebody who has something to hide or who needs an adult to help them with the Internet. This troll told me I was so out of touch because I referred to “lowly” apprentices in a post last week.

Solicitors are made not born. They make them by on the job training. This is the way that they have always done it and it’s a pretty good system. When I was training to become a solicitor, it was called an apprenticeship. I was an apprentice; to a master in fact. These are terms of which I am nostalgically fond. And I think that the idea of learning from a master is a very good one.

But some took issue with this archaic terminology and had it abolished, now what were apprentice solicitors are called trainees and I believe that the people that they learn from are called something very imaginative such as training solicitors. (I have in fact been one myself.)

Perhaps the troll was upset because he felt that my reference to trainee solicitors as apprentices was an affront to all such good people. Or perhaps that my reference to such people as being of lowly in status was an outrage. If he were correct on either score he might have a point. But of course I was not referring to anyone other than myself and in 1995 I was an apprentice and boy was I lowly.

And the further I have gone on the lowlier I have become. Trolls are not burdened with self-doubt, but for the rest of us, once we don’t let it rule us, it is a most useful regulator.

By the way if you’d like to see how NOT to handle trolls online (AND HOW THE USE OF CAPS LOCK CAN MAKE YOU LOOK BATSHIT CRAZY) go here: http://goo.gl/QZ337

Increasingly, I am seeing the merits in creating free resources for you on the basis that when you do want and need our services you will experience ever increasing value at every stage.

I have also come to the realisation that we are really a media publishing business that just happens to practice law on the side.

On this point, there’s an awful lot of stuff in the pipeline here at McCarthy News and Media to whet your appetite. Liam’s working on a guide to making your vehicle damage claim for yourself without using a solicitor. To make sure you get everything you’re entitled to from the insurance company. Joseph’s working on the complete guide to buying your home to answer all of your questions along with many you might have never thought of asking on that subject. And this is just as taster, it gets better and more useful from there.

So, while it’s not exactly Citizen Kane, we’re building our own little media empire here at McCarthy & Co. we hope you like it (and more importantly find it helpful.)

Sean is the man behind turning the Star into what I think is one of the most vibrant and innovative media platforms out there, while remembering where it comes from.  It’s a great example of taking a traditional business in a rural location, giving two fingers to the economy and just doing it.

So we got talking about business models.  I love talking about business models and systems in other industries, to see how it might relate to my own.  We talked about everything from Ryanair to the newspaper publishing business.  I was particularly interested in how Sean sees this panning out because it seems to me that there are a number of operators jockeying for position with different models.  As I turns out Sean is also VERY interested in seeing how this pans out: this is the multi-billion dollar question in news media at the moment.

One thing that Sean mentioned that resonated with me is the idea of creating or developing a scarce resource that you can charge for.  My first thought was that we have no such scare resource.  A solicitor is a solicitor, and one can do the job as well as the next, no?  Well no.  But to most people that matter, non-solicitors, potential clients, people like you this may well be the overwhelming perception if not the fact.

So what is our scarce resource?  Trust.

What’s scarce is trust.  That’s what we need to develop.  And that’s what you need to find.

Our clients are clever people, they assume we know what we’re doing; otherwise they wouldn’t be here. What they are really interested in is dealing with people who care about them and getting their stuff sorted and who behind it all are real people with personalities and imaginations.

So today, it’s Friday and I have a treat for you. Mags McCarthy is our financial controller and as such she’s the lady in charge of your money here at McCarthy & Co. She also happens to be my wife. And believe me in this respect Caesar’s wife is certainly above suspicion!

Mags sings with the Allegria singers in Clonakilty and here’s Mrs Mc at their recent concert supported by the extraordinarily talented Sean Ruddy. Enjoy. (And excuse the sound and picture quality; it was John on the iphone!): http://goo.gl/tACFL

Until then yesterday, my wife reminded me that thirteen years ago to the day we had moved from Dublin back to Clonakilty. I started in practice for myself the same month May 2000. I had obviously put that date in my LinkedIn profile and completely unbeknownst to me it decided to tell the world it was my thirteenth anniversary of commencing in practice, which many kindly folk commented on.

How thirteen years can sneak up on you. I remember very well the apprehension I felt coming back to my home town after years away to start in business. I had lived and worked in Dublin for years and I didn’t really know anyone who was around any more. I didn’t play rugby, golf, GAA or tiddlywinks and I was about as unconnected as you can get. I kept worrying what people would think of me as an upstart.

Looking back on it now it was so ridiculous and self-centred. Because of course nobody thought very much of me at all, in general everyone is far too interested in themselves and their own problems and stuff to give a tuppenny cuss about what you do, unless it is somehow relevant or helpful to them. This I have gleaned in the meantime.

Foremost on my list of priorities back then was appearing all grown up and professional. Little did I know that thirteen years later, I’d be doing the exact opposite, running a great business with some fantastic people while spending my days having a rare old time making a complete eejit of myself on the internet. If only I’d known I’d have been mortified.

How you live and learn.

If you wanted to see something on a map the process was even more convoluted where large heavy ordnance survey sheets marked in pen and ink had to be summoned in advance from the bowels of the civil service.

Now the Land Registry is all online and from this user’s perspective it’s an absolutely marvelous achievement, a real success story of the reform and modernisation of that aspect of the civil service. And now the registration of all land and property in the Land Registry is compulsory, so with time as properties change hands the old system of deeds conveyancing will disappear altogether.

But whatever about the pace of change over the last 20 years, a recent development from the mid-seventeenth century really blows my mind. The 1600′s were tumultuous times in Ireland, and the change in the control of land in the country during that period tells an extraordinary tale.

The Down Survey of Ireland project by Trinity College is one of the coolest things I have seen in some time. Ok, so I’m a history and land law nerd, but even for normal people this is amazing stuff.

After Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland he sent William Petty to survey Ireland. It was the first time in the world this had ever been done comprehensively. As a result they have a complete picture of every inch of Ireland in 1641 and in 1670. What the Trinity project has done is taken all of the available maps, put them online and then cross referenced them all with Google maps. It’s just amazing!

You can basically go and look at any part of Ireland, see the original maps and records prepared by Petty in the 1600′s and then check from Google maps who owned it in 1641 and in 1670.

My family were tenant farmers outside Clonakilty in a place called Garralacka. I don’t know how many greats there should be before my grandfather Florence McCarthy who was born there around 1740. But they stuck around and have been giving their first born males girls’ names in that very spot ever since.

Fascinatingly, in 1641 that part of Garralacka was owned by Thomas Kallanane, a Catholic, in 1670 it was owned by Sir William Penn, a Protestant. Sir William was an adventurer rewarded for his support of Cromwell by lands of which this little spot formed part. But Penn had bigger ideas though and went west from Garralacka to the new colonies in America where the state of Pennsylvania bears his name today. If you don’t believe me, go here: http://goo.gl/3JnB1 (and click on the area marked Garralacka.)

The original Down Survey of Ireland maps are here: http://goo.gl/OihJu You really owe it to yourself to check ‘em out: Cromwellian Ireland before your very eyes.

There is often an air abroad that we are going to hell in a hand cart: “if only things were like the good old days”; “why can’t we turn the clock back to a bygone idyl when things were so much simpler and better?” This is bollox.

If you are reading this, you are literate and have access to some class of internet, most likely in some part of the Western world. As such you are among the most fortunate human beings that have ever lived, living at the best time there has ever been for such creatures to be alive. And you thought you had problems?

Pinker’s thesis is the steady decline in violence over the ages. When we look back with any objectivity we see that life in olden days, far from being something to get all dewy eyed about, gets nastier, more brutish and shorter the farther down memory lane you go. The twentieth century is often cited as the anomaly that turns that whole trend on its head; supposedly the most violent century in history. But Pinker analyses this over time and, both in absolute numbers and relative terms based on the number of people on the planet at any given time, the atrocities of the twentieth century have difficulty making into the top five on the former count and top ten on the latter. And that’s based on what was written down in history. It is fair to assume that the further back you go the more unreliable (i.e. under recorded) the numbers.

So, what does Pinker say is the reason for this decline? Well there are many (I really urge you to read the book) but there were two factors that stood out for me:

One was the increase in empathy which was driven by widespread literacy. If you live in a small insular world you can only empathise with close clan and kin you know directly. But if you can read a story told in terms of someone else’s experience, suddenly the ability to empathise becomes scalable. And the more connected you make the world, the more this factor increases. It’s a really optimistic thought.

The second was the move from a culture of honour to a culture of dignity, a process that started in Western Europe. An essential element in this was Hobbes’s Leviathan and the social contract where we gave the monopoly of violence to the state and choose to depend on state administered justice rather than personal instincts for revenge.

And of course for this to work, you need one thing above all: the rule of law.

How wrong I was. The subject was positive psychology. Now that’s not just some hokum where you say to yourself “cheer up, everything’s great, especially you”. That’s just annoying. Positive psychology it seems to me from what I heard is all about using what we know about how the brain works to get the best performance from people.

To boil it down what I took from it was this:-

You decide what you want to achieve and you make a picture in your mind of you doing so.

You worry about only what you can control. You forget completely about what you can’t control.

Of what you can control, you narrow the focus to the two or three most important things required to achieve what you decided upon at the start.

You break the process of getting each of these things down into steps and you assess where you are along that sequence of steps.

You concentrate only on getting to the next step. Ignore the ultimate objective, it’s too far away and will probably seem far too daunting a prospect to bother trying at all.

That’s it. (There’s some seriously brainy stuff behind all of this, but that seems to me to be what it comes down to.)

This all came to my mind when my buddy and me were out on the bike yesterday. We had originally planning a spin to Courtmac. About a 35k round trip from here.

But we decided to throw the plan out the window and we headed off to Timoleague, about 10k. When we got there we said we’d head for Ballinaspittle (we passed the statue – it was not moving- though funnily enough my buddy was there back in the day when it was moving and he said he and the whole crowd there saw it, or thought they saw it.) When we got to Ballinaspittle we were originally thinking we’d turn and come back but when I saw the sign for Kinsale (16k) I said we’ve got to push on and do that. We did and came back through Innishannon and Bandon to Clon. All told 80k.

If you’d have asked us at the start would be go to Kinsale, we’d have said no way. But when we got to each stage, the next one seemed naturally attainable. Except of course with cycling as you go out, so must you come back. What seemed like a great idea to push on at Ballinaspittle sowed the seeds for a lot of fear and loathing on the road home from Bandon to Clon in a headwind!

But what are mere headwinds to the power of positive psychology?!

The man who delivered the talk on positive psychology (who was really excellent by the way) was http://www.linkedin.com/in/lyonsalan

Seriously though, the report is well worth a look if you’re an employer. Some of the stats would have your eyebrows twitching alarmingly northward. The most eye-catching of which for me was that employees spend on average one hour per working day on social media sites. That’s about 13% of an average working week; you have to wonder how those self-same employees would feel about a commensurate 13% pay cut.

But, of course, if you don’t have clear policies in place with your employees telling them exactly what is and isn’t acceptable in terms of IT use while at work, you don’t really have much of a leg to stand on when such problems do arise. And that’s not simply down to issues such as loss of productivity as a result of time spent on the blasted thing but extends to liability for inappropriate postings online and questions around who owns what in terms of the content and networks created by employees in the process.

With the advent of smart phones and tablets, blanket bans via the company’s IT system are a blunt but ultimately ineffective measure. What you need is clear communication setting out what is expected of your employees while they are at work. But you’ve got that covered right?

If you’re interested, the report’s here: http://goo.gl/7eYDz

And if you need a hand with your policies, just drop me a line by clicking here.