A Page on the Web, published in the Solicitors Journal, February 1997.

As I am not a professional journo, the monthly muse sometimes takes a while to reach me. This has been one of those months, and I was in danger of irretrievably missing my deadline before the following wheeze struck me.

The Society for Computers and Law is to hold its Internets, Intranets and Law Conference on 13 and 14 March in London. The first day will be concerned with the law; the second with lawyering. Whereas its predecessor, the Communications and Law Conference in October 1995, also dealt with some aspects of communications then unrelated to the internet, it is a measure of how ubiquitous the technology has now become that the 1997 event focusses exclusively on the internet and intranets. The speakers include many well-known names and others less well-known, but all (I must assume) experts in their fields.

Given the exponential growth in interest and use of the internet by lawyers, the event is likely to be sold out.

Those that attend will no doubt get good value (at £225 for 2 days it comes in at about half the cost of an equivalent commercial event) and come away with a wad of conference notes. Speakers will have puffed their own websites and dropped URLs like pearls before the swine in front of them. On return to the office, the conference notes will sit gathering dust and most of the URLs will remain unvisited. The potential value of the conference will have been lost.

So here then is my solution: a Virtual Companion to the conference. It consists, as I write and as published in hardcopy, of no more than a speakers list. Access it on the web, however, and you will find that all known links to speakers, their firms and their subjects are active.

If you are going to the conference, brush up on the subject first, so you can ask intelligent questions!

Once you’ve been, check up on those sites mentioned – don’t just take their word for it!

And if you can’t be there, be there!

To reserve a place at the Conference contact Ruth Baker at the Society for Computers and Law Telephone 0117 923 7393; the SCL’s website is at www.scl.org

To view Nick’s Virtual Conference Companion, goto [page deleted].