Articles
The Internet for Lawyers
I have been writing about the internet for lawyers since 1995 when it first entered the public consciousness and the first few legal websites were born. These early writings, and many since, are published here Binary Law. In 2007 I joined Delia Venables editing the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, launching the Newsletter online on infolaw. A […]
Internet made easy
20 years ago I wrote my first “Page on the Web” column in the Solicitors Journal with a piece about why you should use the internet. My service provider at the time was Demon Internet. They still are! Thanks Demon.
Judgment day for BAILII
First published by the Society for Computers and Law October 2011 A recent Guardian editorial criticised the status quo in relation to the publication of court judgments and called for more open access. In so doing BAILII came across as the villain of the piece rather than the saviour of free law which most lawyers […]
Accessible law
First published on VoxPopuLII, February 2011. Also published in Justice Wide Open Working Papers, May 2012. Professor Richard Leiter, on his blog, The Life of Books, poses The 21st Century Law Library Conundrum: Free Law and Paying to Understand It: The digital revolution, that once upon a time promised free access to legal materials, will […]
The new UK legislation service
Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, September 2010. Since late July we have a shiny new official home of UK legislation at legislation.gov.uk. In due course this will completely replace the two current legislation services at OPSI and the Statute Law Database. At present some functionality currently available on the Statute Law Database is […]
Free case law – an overview
Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, July 2010. Free case law is old hat now. The House of Lords posted its first judgment on the web in 1996 and BAILII “freed the law” in 2000. But how far have we come since then? This article sums up the current position. Public sector provision The […]
FreeLegalWeb dreaming on
First published in Computers and Law, February 2010. What follows is an account of the development of FreeLegalWeb – a collaborative project designed to join up and make sense of publicly accessible law and authored commentary, and to encourage ongoing contribution and participation, for the benefit of lawyers, advisers and the public at large. Many […]
Search engine optimisation – a holistic approach
First Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, September 2009. Most users don’t look past the first two or three pages of results returned by a search engine, so understanding and implementing search engine optimisation (SEO) is critical. SEO is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search […]
Improving legislation on the web
Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, July 2009. In 1996 HMSO started publishing new legislation on its website. Comprehensive coverage was later extended back to 1987 for Acts and 1988 for SIs. Although publication of legislation was timely and presentation competent, we yearned for what had been promised for many years – a comprehensive, […]
Social networks – how they work
First Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, July 2009. Facebook has over 200 million users; LinkedIn, the network for business and professionals, has over 40 million; Twitter is all the rage; and don’t forget blogs. Although these services are hugely popular, it’s safe to say that amongst lawyers use is still largely confined to […]
The future of lawyers
First published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, January 2009. In The End of Lawyers? (Oxford University Press) Richard Susskind challenges the legal profession to ask what elements of their current work could be undertaken more quickly, more cheaply, more efficiently or to a higher quality using new methods. He makes his case firstly by […]
Law publishing at the crossroads
First Published in the Solicitors Journal, November 2008. Also published in Legal Information Management Vol 9 No 3 2009. In the current climate of increasingly rapid technological change and upheavals in the legal profession, are law firms’ legal information needs being adequately met by law publishers? And what does the future hold, particularly as we […]
The Law publishers and Web 2.0
(with James Mullan) First published August 2008 in the Legal Web ebook Law 2.0 in Progress Web 2.0 has revolutionised publishing. Technologies like blogs, wikis and RSS have made the publishing process so easy that countless millions are now publishers and yet more millions are contributors. And no longer is publishing simply about broadcasting a […]
Towards Gov 2.0
Democracy – as Abraham Lincoln famously defined it – is the government of the people, by the people and for the people. Hitherto, we’ve been able to exercise our democratic rights only at the ballot box, by lobbying our MP and perhaps in public demonstrations. Can Gov 2.0 – the application of Web 2.0 to […]
Quick and easy custom search with Google
Some 18 months ago Google launched its Custom Search service (still in beta) that enables you to create a custom search engine (CSE) focussing on anything up to 2,000 specified URLs. The rationale is that, despite its undoubtedly sophisticated algorithms, even with a carefully crafted search, Google will always return results near the top that […]
