PLEASE PLEASEEEEEE HELP!! student in need of urgent legal / case info!!!!!!!!!

[kim]

Hi everybody, thankyou for looking!!

i'm a student working on a really important project and i desperately
need some info regarding court cases in which company directors have
been held directly accountable for the actions of employees beneth
them e.g. the enrolement process is found to be blatantly biased
toward people of a certain colur and a director had has to resign/
stand down after it was made apparant...

ANYTHING would help where directors/CEOs of large companys were found
to be responsible for and were made accountable for the actions of
people beneth them, actions which they would not necessarily have had
first hand involvment in.

please please PLEASEEEEEEEEE let me know if you can help and give
links to any cases (i need to show evidence) if its possible!

Thankyou again for looking and taking the time to read this (sorry
about any spelling errors!),
kindest regards,
kim

 

[Troy Steadman]

Hi everybody, thankyou for looking!!

i'm a student working on a really important project and i desperately
need some info regarding court cases in which company directors have
been held directly accountable for the actions of employees beneth
them e.g. the enrolement process is found to be blatantly biased
toward people of a certain colur and a director had has to resign/
stand down after it was made apparant...

ANYTHING would help where directors/CEOs of large companys were found
to be responsible for and were made accountable for the actions of
people beneth them, actions which they would not necessarily have had
first hand involvment in.

please please PLEASEEEEEEEEE let me know if you can help and give
links to any cases (i need to show evidence) if its possible!

Thankyou again for looking and taking the time to read this (sorry
about any spelling errors!),
kindest regards,
kim

You don't do yourself any favours with this wheedling style Kim.
Anyway the method of solving a problem like this is:

Open Google - http://www.google.co.uk/

Choose Groups - http://www.google.co.uk/grphp?hl=en&tab=wg&q=

Keep searching using likely words. A search using:

"director" "prosecuted" "employee"

throws up:

http://tinyurl.com/5nwhv

and the first thread is this from "Worker"

http://tinyurl.com/5m5cx

containing the paragraph:

"As a result, there have been only nine successful prosecutions,
amongst which #25,000 was the greatest fine, and only two
proprietors have been jailed. The managing director of the activity
centre responsible for the deaths of four schoolchildren in a
canoeing disaster in Lyme Bay, Dorset got three years in 1994;
and the managing director of Jackson Transport (Ossett) Ltd got
a year in 1996, following the death of an employee who inhaled
chemicals. Among many high-profile prosecution failures are the
1987 Zeebrugge ferry disaster, in which 187 people died, and the
1997 Southall rail disaster, in which seven died. The HSE decided
not to bother prosecuting over the Kings Cross underground fire,
in which 31 people died, and the Clapham rail crash, in which 35
people were killed and almost 500 injured. Recently, they also
decided not to bother for the Paddington train crash in 1999, in
which 31 people died. The only high profile case they have gone
ahead with presently is charging Network Rail and Balfour Beatty
over the Hatfield rail crash of October 2000."

You need to judge whether the information is accurate but you can get
info about virtually everything using this method. Good luck.

 

[Troy Steadman]

Okay I've got a bit of time to kill this morning so lets see if we can
crack this. I'll say how I would (and do with a lot of success) approach
such a project in this modern day and age, where so much information is
available, and anyone else can chip in with any improvements.

You are in the right group to start a project like this. Many of the
people here are auditors and an audit of an unfamiliar company and a
university project such as yours have much in common:

1) You don't know what information you will find.
2) You do know there will be a lot of it.
3) There mustn't be any gaps, everything must be finished.

But you *do* know what the answer will be:

In the auditors case the "answer" will be the (perhaps amended)
accounts.

In your case the answer will be the original question.

So after you have opened Word (it *must* be Word, Office Professional
for Students is around £125 and is a "must have"), and Titled the first
page you come to the most important page of all:

P2: The index.

This is going to be a knock 'em dead project with Case Transcripts,
illustrations, diagrams, pictures of the important parties, Directors,
Judges, Employees, pictures of train crashes and ferry disasters where
director's were *not* prosecuted (because the reason they were *not*
form part of the reasoning behind why others *were*).

There is going to be a lot of information. How are we going to store it?
Via the index. Write out the question in the form of a list on page 2,
number the list 1,2,3 etc, set up a chapter for each item in the list,
*link* the chapter to the page number in the index so the index is
self-paginating, make sure that works before going any further.

If an auditor drops a thousand pieces of paper and they are all muddled,
how will he ever get them back in order? Easy, they are self indexed, if
Fixed are 1 and Motor Cars are A, then the invoice for BMW ABC123 will
be 1A-123 - or whatever! In your case suppose there are 20 cases which
are imposrtant, and you have indexed R vs Bloggs as Chapter 8.

An overview of the case will be 8a. The important arguments will be 8b.
The judges summing up 8c. The transcript Appendix 8i. Or whatever.
Establish the pattern that will enable you to do the whole project
like a jigsaw puzzle, slotting in any part you come across that seems to
fit, but without the danger of missing any part out of the puzzle.

There is one final important page, the last page bibliography. Whenever
you insert anything into your project leave a link in the text and in
the bibliography. You are bound to need to go back and cross-reference
conflcting material. If the link is long, as it often is, go to:

http://tinyurl.com/

and make it readable. The last act of all will be to take most of these
links out of the final printed copy to make it seem like you did all the
work yourself ;o)

Every few minutes do a backup. MyTitle001.doc becomes MyTitle002.doc
then
MyTitle003.doc. Every time you have 20 of them back them up elsewhere
(with piccies they will soon become too big for a floppy, if you don't
have a CD writer e-mail it to someone occasionally as an attachment).

You will inadvertantly delete your project at some stage and it is
*very important* to have a backup which is recent and reliable.

Now lets see about those 9 cases...



--

 

[Big Arsenal Fan]

Okay I've got a bit of time to kill this morning so lets see if we can
crack this.

<snip> waffle

What on earth are you on?

 

[Troy Steadman]

Now lets see about those 9 cases...

LOL tinyurl doesn't seem to be working at present.

The next method is to "fan out" across the internet picking up hints of
which keywords might turn up something.

"Worker" gives us a hint about "Jackson Transport (Ossett) Ltd", a
search of uk.legal using that phrase gives us - nothing.

How about "canoeing" "Lyme" "Bay" - once again nothing.

Try "corporate" "killing", many threads thrown up including this one
by James from 1998:

"Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't the Draft
Involuntary Homicide Bill 1995 (Law Com Report no 237) cover the new
offence of Corporate Killing (s4)".

Now you have a Low Com Report no to work with (whatever that may be) so
pop that into Google. Nothing in Google Groups, so try the www. That
give you:

http://users.aber.ac.uk/uuk/comp4corpmanslaughter.html

If you think that is beginning to get you where you want to be, amend
your indext to include a chapter called:

"Modelling corporate liability" (as opposed to "Models of corporate
liability" which is what the website calls it - you don't want *any* of
your phrases to be Google-able by a suspicious lecturer), and give it 4
linked subheadings and perhaps 4 more sub-sub-headings for sub-head 2:

1. Vicarious liability
2. Identification – the ‘directing mind’ theory
2a Lennard’s Carrying Co Ltd v Asiatic Petroleum Co Ltd [1915] AC 705.
2b DPP v Kent and Sussex Contractors [1944] KB 146
2c R v ICR Haulage Ltd [1944] KB 551
2d Moore v Bresler [1944] 2 All ER 515...

and so on. Keep fannning out and picking up clues, try to find
newspaper articles, be careful to rewrite everything, (OTH you can drop
in sizeable quotes to save time), remember to paste in pictures wherever
you come across them to make your report more interesting and
professional-looking (put them in Text Boxes in Word and switch on the
"paragraph" symbol so you can "anchor" the pictures and diagrams
to the appropriate text).

When you have finished you will something that is wholly your own work,
is a pleasure to the eye, contains everything the question demanded,
nothing it didn't, and will have taught you all you need to know about
the subject and about Word.








--

 

[Troy Steadman]

<snip> waffle

What on earth are you on?

Look at your watch, if it's before 4pm I'm on Tesco Red Label,
if it's after, Hopback Summer Lightning. Kim posted this same question
in uk.legal on 24th and again on the 25th September, now once again on
the 27th so it doesn't look like she's getting very far.

At least you're not the idiot who's going to come along here and say,
"You don't want Word there are much better free-to-use Linux programs".


--