I started writing here some years ago, at a time when my focus was largely on the changing tools of legal practice; technology, branding, and the early movement toward cloud-based systems. Those questions interested me then, and they still do. But they sit at a lower level than the questions that now, more than a decade later, seem to me to be more important.

This blog is being restarted for a different purpose.

It is not intended as a marketing channel, nor as a stream of commentary on current events. There are already more than enough places for both. It is also not a personal diary. What I want to do here is something more deliberate and, I hope, more durable.

This is a place to think about judgement, structure, and continuity.

In my work as a solicitor, and in building software systems for clients and lawyers, I am increasingly struck by how much depends not on technical knowledge alone, but on the quality of judgement applied to particular situations. Most legal problems are not solved by information; they are resolved by seeing clearly what matters, what does not, and what should be done next. That is a skill, but it is also a discipline, and it is not reliably taught.

At the same time, I am concerned with how systems – legal, commercial, and increasingly technological – either support or undermine that discipline. Many modern systems are efficient, but they are not always aligned with how people actually think and behave. They can obscure responsibility, fragment decision-making, and encourage activity without direction. The question that interests me is not simply how to make systems work, but how to make them support sound judgement and responsible action over time.

There is also a wider context. The institutions and habits that have historically sustained a stable and civilised society, especially law, local life, shared norms of conduct, are not self-maintaining. They require attention, use, and renewal. They are carried forward not by theory alone, but by people who are capable of exercising judgement within them. That, in turn, depends on formation: how people are trained, what they see modelled, and what is expected of them.

So the scope of this blog is intentionally broad, but it is not unfocused. It will touch on:

• how decisions are made, and how they can be improved
• how legal and commercial structures succeed or fail
• how systems should be designed to align with human responsibility
• how continuity is maintained across generations, in families, firms, and communities

Some of this will be drawn directly from practice. Some from observation. Some from older sources, including writers such as Blake, Green, and Lewis, who addressed these questions in a different idiom, but often with greater clarity than we manage now.

The aim is to build a small body of writing that is coherent, practical, and capable of being used. If it is useful, it should be readable more than once. If it is not, it is probably not worth writing.