· Are you worried about your company's communications? According to a survey by Emphasis Training, you probably ought to be, since it found that one in five business documents was badly written. This might not seem to matter much except that the cost to the economy is, claims the training company, costing billions per year. The waste comes from people having to wade through the many badly written documents and work out what they actually mean. Chief among the faults were bad grammar, unexplained acronyms and misuse of jargon. The survey was launched to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Plain English campaign.

· Insurance company AXA has issued a report that suggests there's a new risk to business: the rise of the litigation culture. The company's survey said 36% of SMEs believed litigation was a threat, and 23% of senior executives had been involved in litigation of some sort. Only 69% of companies appeared to be aware of their liabilities and only 47% had taken out any insurance to cover litigation. Many of the respondents felt litigation was on the increase - one, for example, cited a Scottish employee who had taken legal action over her boss imitating her accent, and won.

· The Institute of IT Training is to kick off a new award scheme for "freelance trainer of the year". It will be sponsored by freelance training agency Broadskill. Judges will be looking for excellent references, proven case histories and some sort of consistency in the quality of the training on offer. More information is available at www.ittrainingawards.com.

· It's looking safe to say August has, for parts of the UK, been a pretty typical British summer, with heavy rain and serious floods. It is, therefore, worth considering what a company would do in the event of a flood, which has led specialist document recovery company DocumentSOS to make flood recovery the theme of its "Keeping Afloat" event this year. Set to take place at London's Royal Geographical Society on November 2, anyone signing up early can get in for £70, which includes six months' DocumentSOS membership. Further information is available at www.documentsos.com.

· Communications specialist izR Solutions has launched what it describes as the UK's first low-cost broadband package, although since many are now around at under £20 a month, you'd have to query that. The unique thing about izR's offer is that it's a pay-as-you-go set-up, and will be suitable only for the business owner/manager since it's available only in the evenings and weekends. The idea is to use some of the spare bandwidth available when the company's core business customers are offline. BT has responded with its own pay-as-you-go package, which it is reportedly testing.

· Small software house LookOut has been bought by Microsoft. The company will continue to give away its LookOut searching software, which can be added to Microsoft Outlook and a number of other email systems; with it, searching through an archive of emails and a hard disk full of documents takes a fraction of the time it normally would. The software is available for free at www.lookoutsoft.com and will turn up on the MSN website as well. It's hoped they'll make it sensitive to UK date formats as well as American ones as it becomes used more widely. It has a new competitor, however, in the shape of Blinkx, which searches the web, publicly available video and the local disk as well.

· People who complain about the UK's data protection laws may be getting a fillip from an unlikely source; the EU is concerned that British law might be out of step with the European directive on the subject. The query came over the definition of "personal data" following a case involving the Financial Services Authority. It is known for certain that the commission has written to the data protection registrar, but the content of the letter has yet to be placed on the record.

· It's official: online conferences don't work for business. At least so says Doctor Mark Smith, chairman of Nemisys Enterprises and one of the pioneers of online conferencing. Having run the first online conference in 1997, you might expect him to push the idea as being a cert for making a profit, but he has now announced he's seen too many online systems packed out with spurious advertising and extra content which bankrolls the technology but distracts the participant. He believes that the best use of online conferencing now is in a not-for-profit area, in which making money isn't as important as sharing information.