A Page on the Web, published in the Solicitors Journal, October 1998.
Two new online services for lawyers have just set up on the web. They need you; will you use them?
Lawlink
Lawlink serves as a web gateway – or portal as everyone is calling them nowadays (what’s the difference?, my dictionary certainly can’t tell) – and also offers secure email services. Using the same model which has successfully operated in Ireland for the last few years, Lawlink has negotiated deals with a number of information providers and offers access to a package of these services from £35 per month, with some additional services available on a pay-as-you-go basis. This pricing model, of course, will be good enough reason for some to subscribe to Lawlink, but will this be sufficient for Lawlink to succeed in the UK?
Lawlink’s success in the Republic must in large measure be due to the facts that it is a joint venture company with the Irish Law Society and that it was launched at a time when there was nothing comparable available to Irish lawyers, indeed not much for them on the web at all. However, there are many gateways and other services for UK lawyers readily available on the web. How will this square up?
Services available through Lawlink include Extel company reports, RM Online company searches, Dunn & Bradstreet company credit reports, Infolink legal and business news and reports and downloadable electronic forms from Laserform. There are also framed links to Companies House and the Patent Office. Further services to be added include access to the Smith Bernal Casetrack service.
In fact Laserform’s website is also hosted on the Lawlink server, though there is currently little useful information on the site.
Lawyers Online
Lawyers Online describes itself as a dedicated internet service provider for lawyers. It hopes to make its mark by having inserted a CD ‘containing the necessary software to enable a lawyer to get on line with Lawyers Online’ into 84,000 copies of the Gazette. It seems to offer no more than what is available at similar cost elsewhere, namely internet connection at £9.99 per month, domain name registration, web design services and a selection of law links.
It uses a curious logic in stating that it will ‘provide the fastest access for lawyers to the internet as possible there will be no other traffic on the server’ – and I always thought that computers recognised only ons and offs! There are also rotating graphics and a counter on the site showing an impressive number – two very sad features which I would expect any serious site to eschew.
Legal Practice in the Digital Age
This leads me on (the logic will become clear) to a brand new book by Charles Christian which seeks to answer the questions Will there ever be an application which really does transform a lawyer’s working life? and What impact will the new digital technologies have on the legal world?
This is a slim volume – the commentary runs to less than a hundred pages, with a useful 20-page Legal Technology Lexicon at the back. So it is an easy two-hour read; three if you’re making the supper and putting the kids to bed at the same time.
Written in his usual pacy style, this is a thought-provoking treatise, backed up by a wealth of facts, figures and case studies. The central thesis is that lawyers should now pay less attention to inward-looking administrative systems and turn their efforts towards outward-looking, client-facing technologies that can meet the increasingly sophisticated demands of their customers. The old lawyer-client relationship is dead: the legal market is now a far more complicated place in which clients are no longer prepared to tolerate the inefficiencies and shortcomings of their advisors.
Where does the internet come in? Why of course that email is the application that has most transformed working lives and that ‘client-facing’ services are readily deliverable from secure sites on the internet (and are already being so delivered by many enterprising firms).
The final chapter lacks the pace and interest of its predecessors, but is full of sound recommendations as to how a practice without in-house IT expertise should go about developing such services. The key one for me is ‘Think digital’ – or put another way ‘think no paper’. Certainly that has transformed for the better the way I work and communicate with others.
Legal Practice in the Digital Age: the quest for the killer legal app, Bowerdean Publishing, £19.99.
