Last week was a special week in the Jacksons calendar as we had teams at the Great Yorkshire Show for three days. As part of our contract as NFU panel solicitors, we exhibit in the NFU tent at the show. It is always fun to catch up with clients and referrers and to watch the world go by. This is such a big event in the summer calendar of so many people especially the rural communities in the North. Everyone likes to tell you how early they got up to get there and there is always an array of interesting purchases being marched out at the end of the day. This year the weather was on the whole, lovely, which always helps. The talk of this years’ show seemed to be how marvellous the new food hall was and the potential effect of Brexit on farmers entitlements. Definitely some uncertainty in the air. The produce and food at this show is always fantastic – you can tell it is locally produced. We should be very proud of our farmers and support them whenever we can.
Later in the week thoughts turned to I.T. – never my strong point at the best of times but we were interviewing prospective firms to provide our I.T. support contract. When discussing response times it becomes more and more obvious that we can do next to nothing now without I.T and that we are totally dependent on it functioning to carry out nearly every office task. Having said that, it is amazing to think that this building could burn down and very quickly we could be up and running somewhere else with access to all client files because so much is stored online and backed up. Gone are the days when if a paper file was destroyed you have lost everything. This does of course provide worries of its own and we have to engage more and more in activities to protect our data from cyber- attack. All three companies we saw this week talked about interrogating our servers which conjurers a picture for me of someone demanding “But why did you do that ?” which is what I have been known to yell at my laptop. From now onwards, when eyebrows are raised I will be quite clear I am not losing my temper with an inanimate object but interrogating it! Shows how little I know about I.T!
