Kieran Flatt, writing in Legal IT, believes that there are only five law firms in the UK that have demonstrated any serious long-term commitment to developing online businesses:

• Linklaters (Blue Flag)
• Berwin Leighton Paisner (BeProfessional)
• Eversheds
• Allen & Overy (NewChange)
• Addleshaw Goddard

Pinsent Masons’ OUT-LAW.com service is not on his list as it is a free service and he does not mention Freshfields or Simmons & Simmons. He goes on to say that:

Firms that have ignored e-business are not losing any significant amount of revenue. And if the demand for it does arise, they can always play catch-up; after all, most of their key competitors will be in exactly the same boat. The e-commerce people at the world’s top firms normally justify their team’s existence on the vague, woolly premise that online services are an unquantifiable ‘value-add’ to the firm’s serious business of generating revenue. But this is a rather weak premise on which to base a request for the firm to invest serious capital in developing these things. Why not just take clients to a better class of restaurant?

He does, though only in passing, indicate he is talking only of “large law firms”; in fact the largest. Lower down the size scale the productisation of legal services continues apace.

The difference between the large firm (primarily bespoke services) and the small firm (commoditisable services) is the subject of a major article by Professor Richard Susskind in the launch issue of Legalease’s Legal Technology journal on the way the utilisation of IT is changing the legal market from a bespoke to commodity model.

More about large firm services in my recent article Servicing the corporate client.