A Page on the Web, published in the Solicitors Journal, July 1998.
A recent survey by James & Cowper and Lawnet is reported to have found that 30 per cent of law practices have a website. Can this possibly be true?
As with all surveys, the answer lies in the sample. 30 per cent of those responding to the survey may well have websites, but the following demonstrates why the reported figure is not representative of the profession as a whole:
- Lawnet members are more computerate than most practices.
- Computerate practices are more likely than most to answer IT questionnaires.
- Computerate practices are more likely than most to have a website.
- Therefore Lawnet members responding to an IT questionnaire are many times more likely than most to have a website. QED.
In fact, less than 500 firms in the UK have a website. My own database of law firm websites, which I know to be pretty comprehensive, has, at 20 July, 404 records for England and Wales and 53 for Scotland. 55 English barristers chambers also have a website.If you’re not on my list, then you’re either a very new site or you’re not doing a very good job publicising it. How can you rectify this? Tell me and tell the world! Although there are many lists of law firm websites. I’d suggest you first need to submit your details to only three key sites, whence your listing will propagate itself onto other listings. These sites are:
- infolaw – This is the site I maintain for my company. It is focused exclusively on the UK legal web and is the product of continuous active human research of the web, rather than the passive gathering of information or the spidering technologies favoured by other sites.
- Delia Venables – Delia has maintained her Legal Resources site for almost as long as infolaw. It is compiled as a result of similarly thorough research and inside knowledge and serves as a good complement.
- Yahoo UK: Law Firms – Yahoo is one of the best known of the global ‘search engines’. Its strength is that, while it uses sophisticated data gathering and indexing techniques, all its listings have actually been screened by a human, so it does not simply produce mindless hitlists.
You might feel you should also submit your details to a number of other high profile law websites. For example the Society for Computers and Law, Sweet & Maxwell, a number of the university sites all maintain listings of law firm sites. However, finding all these sites and submitting details to all of them starts to become a major project and in my view the time would be better spent elsewhere. Any other listing worth its salt should review one of the above listings from time to time and supplement its own lists.
Are the publishers cashing in?
An issue which has recently consumed several ‘column inches’ in the lawtech discussion fora is that of pricing of electronic legal information services, in particular the new range of ‘conversion’ products from the mainstream law publishers. These are generally electronic versions of existing looseleaf services, published on CD-ROM but with some now also available on the web. The general consensus seems to be that these products/services are too expensive (surprise, surprise), particularly when compared with the price of the corresponding hard copy product.
Now, I am as much a fan as the next person of competitive pricing, but some of the arguments advanced display a touching naiveté. Lets face it, capitalism is not under immediate threat in this country and for years the publishers have been making tidy sums peddling the legal profession books. (Equally lawyers have been making tidy sums peddling their clients legal advice; etc, etc). In the 70s the publishers cottoned on to the idea that you could make an even healthier profit by printing fewer pages more often and getting the customer to make up his/her own copy of the next edition. This is known as the looseleaf service. The looseleaf service is in fact a disservice, generating as it does countless unproductive hours checking lists of pages, filing pages, finding lost pages, discovering that ‘the next paragraph is [not the one you think it should be dummy]’ or that ‘[sorry to interrupt the flow of text, but] this page is intentionally blank’. You have been paying for this.
Along comes the white knight Electronic Publishing to free you from all that, but woe!, both publisher and lawyer have a dilemma. The publisher must produce both hard copy and new-fangled electronic product for the foreseeable future. But the more successful the electronic product, the greater the decline in the subscriptions to the looseleaf service.
And you, the customer, feel in the majority you must continue to subscribe to the hard copy while also taking advantage of the undoubted attractions of the new electronic product: you would like the CD version bundled in (for free) as part of the service. An increasing minority is quite happy to dispense with the looseleaf service entirely and rely solely on the superior research capabilities of the electronic version: you think the CD should be cheaper (well, it’s cheaper to produce, isn’t it?).
I am struggling to reach a conclusion here, and there is also the vexed issue of mult-user pricing to consider. More later.
Web Watch
Associations
Business & Finance
CAROL – blue chip company annual reports online
MoneyWorld – personal finance and stock market prices
Employment
Legal links
Internet Law site – the former Law Society Services domain continues independently to maintain the legal links library
National Centre for Legal Education – now has a good set of legal links
University of Kent, Canterbury – links to law-related sites improved and extended
Government
Kable Signposts to Government – for all aspects of electronic government
Intellectual Property
The Patent Office – now has links to other IP sites on the web
