Cats Legal kindly asked me to speak at their client event last night. More compelling than me as an attraction, I suspect, was the fact that the venue was Bacchanalia , the specialists in fine Spanish wines, whose premises are on the floor above Cats Legal at Broken Wharf, close by the Millennium Bridge. To have spoken last week overlooking Sydney Harbour (as recounted here), and then to do so with the Thames at my back shows how lucky I am in the platforms offered to me.

Broken Wharf is above and to the right of the right-hand pier of the Millennium Bridge

I am not really a wine drinker, partly because it is incompatible with the late hours which are my best working time and partly because (as I now realise) most of what I am offered is acrid-smelling plonk. I do not know what was the white wine which I drank last night (I will find out) but it bore no relation to anything else which I have drunk recently. I know one is supposed on these occasions to move around the room sampling everything, but having found one I liked with my first glass, I stuck with it. The tasting was accompanied by thinly-sliced Spanish hams and white bread which were delicious. It is not strictly my business to promote gastronomic establishments, but anyone wishing to host a corporate event should include this place on their list.

Before the drinking, there was work to do. Bill Joss of Cats Solutions (who was with me in Liverpool recently) gave a welcoming speech and Dave Green of Bacchanalia introduced the tasting. Fortunately for me, the guests were allowed to get stuck in at that point – I know what it is like to be the speaker who stands between the audience and its swilling, and prefer them to have had enough, but not too much, before I start.

It seemed a good opportunity to pull together some of the threads which are at the top of my agenda at the moment – the International parallels, the Jackson report, the practice direction and questionnaire, the salutary cases, and the prospect of the disintermediation of law firms as clients enter into direct relationships with technology providers. Together, these represent a mix of risks and opportunities. We had to get good at the interaction of rules and technology, I said, and to remember that the clients were not much interested in either of them – they just want their cases brought to an end quickly, cost-effectively and, preferably, successfully. The enemy was ignorance; the battle was to retain litigation as part of companies’ commercial strategies where appropriate.

I was careful to choose a train which terminated at Oxford. Had I not done so, this dispatch would come to you from Worcester, at the end of the line. It is a tribute to the quality of Bacchanalia’s wine that, when I woke up at 4:00 am to see my second son, Tom, off to LA, my head was clear.

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