I have been slack in my posting duties lately but I have been very busy making a big job change. I am leaving private practice to join a large shipping line as its US legal counsel. I am excited about the move and hopefully I will have new information to share here from the perspective of in house counsel I also hope to bring in guest bloggers from the company who can post about significant developments in the liner business.
For example, I was meeting with the VP of Information Systems and he was discussing the concept of scrapping the bill of lading practice as we know it today. As he sees it, the function of IT in shipping lines today is to try and force a paper based transaction into a computer model - hence Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). As EDI as not been successfully deployed maritime industry wide and there are competing standards galore, he believes that scrapping the entire system and reinventing the transaction as a purely electronic transaction not based on a paper model would be the long term solution. For a good overview of the history of EDI and the problems associated with it in the maritime industry - see this paper by Edmund Greiner
Once I get settled, I will try to get the VP to guest blog about this topic.
