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

This time last year I reviewed what was available from the lawtech suppliers on the web and found them, for the most part, wanting. Given the general explosion in web activity over the past twelve months I expected the position to have changed dramatically. Faced with a list of just over 100 exhibitors at this year’s show, I set to work to discover if my expectations were justified … to find those sites I would not normally reach.

The technique was straightforward: fire up Alta Vista and firstly search on the company name (as supplied by the Truemist, the organisers); then if that yielded too many hits, irrelevant hits or no hits, to use a bit of nouse and try a few advanced’ searches to track down the home page.

After an hour or so I had the results. Though not quite meeting expectations, with 40 sites found, the exercise was satisfying, revealing some interesting facts along the way.

For the most part the sites are, of course, promotional vehicles with information about the company and products and services on offer. The exception to this is, as expected, the publishers, who in the main provide at least some useful legal information on the web. This year there are approaching 20 exhibitors who can be regarded as publishers or information providers and over half of these have websites.

Many of the exhibitors do not have their own websites per se, being part of a larger group company whose site no doubt includes relevant information (I didn’t necessarily hang around long enough to find out).

A few companies whom I fully expected to find were strangely elusive. The Midland Bank for example seems not to exist in cyberspace, although there are of course hundreds of sites containing references to it. The domain name midland.co.uk has been registered, though is not in use on the Web and midland.com is a wholly unrelated business. The exercise also highlighted what a disadvantage it is on the web to have a nondescript or at least non-unique name since these are much more difficult to search out.

SOLEX97 exhibitors on the web lists the results indicating where relevant, information services of use to practitioners which are provided in addition to company information.