June 2000

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E-commerce for the panicked

25 June 2000 in Pages on the Web

A Page on the Web, published in the Solicitors Journal, June 2000

It is now widely stated that firms who do not have an e-commerce capability will soon be out of business. The internet is all-pervasive and while it may not yet have taken as firm a hold on the provision of legal services as it has in other areas, it should be obvious by now that it is only a matter of time before it does.

But if you are not already embarked on an e-commerce strategy there seems to me no reason to panic … yet. The jargon and the hype tend to obscure the fact that the message is simply that one should be in a position to use the internet effectively and efficiently for conducting business. This requires the following steps:

  • using the internet yourself
  • establishing an internet presence
  • developing your internet identity
  • marketing your internet presence
  • developing your internet services
  • conducting transactions over the internet

It is not the intention of this article to provide a ‘how to’ guide – a rather longer document would be required. However, below are a number of points to consider along the way.A useful set of links to legal sites involved in e-commerce is Delia Venables’ page on Selling and Marketing Legal Services Online at www.venables.co.uk/selling.htm.

Using the internet

You cannot hope to start developing a sensible strategy until you have investigated the medium. It is not sufficient to leave this to the ‘techies’ (if any are available to you) since you primarily need to investigate what your competition is up to rather than how they are doing it. So put in a couple of days concerted surfing the web from a starting point such as this site.

Establishing an internet presence

Establishing a physical internet presence is of course a pre-requisite! If you are not sure how to go about this on your own, there are many who will seek to help you. Make a note of those companies who have assisted firms whose sites appeal to you and those who specialise in the legal marketplace (most of whom will advertise in the legal press). You may need hand-holding at first, but the aim should be to involve yourselves in the process rather than leaving it all up to a design company.

An important step in the process is to register a domain name and it makes sense in the first instance to register one or more names as close as possible to your firm’s name (without being long-winded) as both a .co.uk and a .com if available. Any number of registered names can be pointed at the same physical website.

Most law firm websites are at present ‘brochure’ sites, consisting of pages of information about the firm, its services and personnel. Such pages are a minimum requirement, but will not on their own generate significant business.

Developing your internet identity

Before going further, you need to ask your(internet)self who you are and why you are there. Are you simply a billboard for Bloggs & Bloggs posted on the internet? Shouldn’t you be Bloggs & Bloggs trading on the internet? Or should you (instead or in addition) have a distinct internet identity based on the particular internet services you provide? In other words, consider the most appropriate branding for your internet services. Many firms now have websites under the firm’s name but also deliver particular services under a distinct internet brand name. Generally this internet trading name will be the domain name. Examples of such services are nextlaw.com, divorceuk.com , accidentdirect.com, etc. It is said that most such ‘memorable’ domain names are now ‘used up’. However, clearly there is still a virtually unlimited number of distinctive names which may be used.

Marketing your internet presence

With probably in excess of a billion pages now on the web, your effort will more than likely go virtually unnoticed unless you put significant effort into promoting your presence. It’s worth repeating the standard advice given in most primers on setting up and marketing your web presence:

  • quote your web address prominently on every communication you issue
  • register with all the internet search engines
  • establish reciprocal links with associates and other business contacts

If you accept that your internet presence should be more than just another aspect of your firm’s marketing – ie that it should be a revenue earning business unit – then you will need to plan and develop a marketing strategy for that business accordingly.One avenue for firms with limited marketing resources of their own is to subscribe to a site which markets the legal services of its associates. Member firms are generally charged a fee or perhaps a percentage for business referred.

Developing your internet services and conducting transactions over the internet

To get started delivering your services over the internet it is not necessary to spend a lot of time and money developing sophisticated databases, forms and automated processes – those can follow in due course. Much can be achieved simply by effective email communication.

  • ensure that the services you can offer online are clearly and succinctly stated with prominent mailback links
  • ensure that you have an email address for each area of practice
  • ensure that the mail for these addresses is monitored constantly and that replies are sent more or less immediately
  • wherever appropriate use email and email attachments rather than fax/snail mail – this is why you’re online!

Getting the most from the Web (I): a jump start

5 June 2000 in Articles

Published in P.S., the journal of Probate Section, June 2000
Part of this article originally appeared in the Solicitors Journal, February 2000

Most organisations of any size now have websites. Indeed it is frequently the case that an organisation’s web address is the most prominent (and sometimes the only) form of address appearing in its advertisements. There are also many millions of individuals and very small organisations who also have websites. Collectively these sites provide a huge and valuable resource for information and exchange. But the sheer size of this resource requires

Which websites are the most useful to the lawyer? What do they offer? and How can they be found? This article answers these questions in overview, with some detailed help on using search engines. Subsequent articles will look in more detail at using the web to assist probate practice in particular.

If you have a particular comment, query or problem relating to probate practice on the web, please email it to NickHolmes@infolaw.co.uk and I will take account of it in subsequent articles.

The ‘legal web’

The sites that will be most immediately useful to the UK lawyer I refer to as the ‘UK legal web’. These include:

  • Government, the parliaments and the courts. Official sites provide free access to primary legal materials, other official documents and guidance, rules, forms and a variety of other information to assist your practice.
  • Lawyers. Your associates and competitors’ sites are naturally generally aimed at attracting and retaining clients. However, on many sites there is much useful material which can assist the small practitioner with otherwise limited information resources, including commentary on legal developments, briefings, newsletters, articles, checklists and precedents. They will also, of course, be useful as a reference point in developing your own web services.
  • Law associations. The websites of the Law Society and the many specialist associations provide much useful information directly relevant to your practice.
  • Law schools. Many law schools have been long-established on the web and their websites provide a wealth of materials.
  • Commercial law publishers, both the more established and the newer breed of information providers, provide a variety of free materials. The higher value information services are generally charged on annual subscription and have yet to make much impact except at the top end of the market.
  • There are many other non-profit organisations relevant to your practice publishing a wide range of information.
  • Don’t forget many of your suppliers are online. Books, office supplies, law stationery, legal staff – all are available now over the web.

Gateways to the legal web

How does one gain access to all these useful sites without wasting hours of fruitless endeavour? One needs an effective jumping off point, or – in current parlance – a ‘portal’.

A portal (or gateway), as the word implies, is a site designed to facilitate access to the web. Portals are flavour of the month these days, as a successful site can attract a high volume of traffic which will in turn attract advertising revenue and other commercial opportunities. There are many pretenders to the UK legal portal throne, with as many different approaches. Given the democratic nature of the web, it is unlikely that any one will establish dominance. I can do no better than recommend you first visit the infolaw gateway at www.infolaw.co.uk which I maintain [picture: infolaw.bmp]. This provides a classified index of the UK legal web, including browsable listings of lawyers, government and legal resources by topic, selected for relevance and quality, plus classified listings of suppliers, topical articles on developments in the UK legal web (including this article) and other features. Included also is a listing of other legal gateways.

Finding things on the web

The web consists of probably more than a billion pages of information and an elite handful of services, including such names as Alta Vista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Yahoo and Google have established themselves as robust and efficient solutions to searching the whole of the web (though none indexes every page).

The vast majority of web users simply type a few words into a search box and see what happens. It seems sensible therefore to concentrate on two key factors determining the relevance of your search results: choosing the ‘right’ search engine and choosing search terms carefully.

Choosing a search engine

Most search engines will return results for pages that contain any of your search terms, ranking results by weighting some or all of the following:

  • the number of search terms matched
  • the frequency of occurrence of the terms
  • the part of the page in which the terms are found (ie title, body text, keywords etc)
  • the proximity of the terms
  • the order in which you entered the terms

Though these search engines will return millions of hits, the most relevant sites will generally be contained on the first half-dozen pages. Even so, there will be a number of results on those first pages which (for one reason or another) are not relevant and many relevant results which are buried much deeper down the list and likely never to be seen. Also the ranking applied may at best seem haphazard.

Google

Google (www.google.com), a relatively new search engine, uses an entirely different approach and in my view stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Google returns results for pages that contain all your search terms, ranking pages according to their popularity (according to how many other pages link to them) and according to the proximity of your search terms. Google also exerpts the text that matches your query.

Google’s page ranking method deserves further explanation. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Google assesses a page’s importance by the votes it receives and also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important.

Google’s page ranking system is therefore a general indicator of importance and does not depend on a specific query. Rather, it is a characteristic of a page itself based on data from the web that Google analyzes. It precludes human interference – so no one can ‘purchase’ a higher rank or commercially alter results.

Choosing your search terms

It is of course very difficult to generalise about the use of search terms, but it is worth bearing in mind always that a web search engine has indexed the whole of the web and you should therefore be aiming as much to screen out or demote the irrelevant or low value sites as to find the relevant.

A few pointers therefore for selecting terms for ‘legal’ searches:

  • Use terms that lawyers rather than laymen would use. This will screen out for example many ‘law for the layman’ sites.
  • As an extension of the above, use titles to Acts, SIs etc which are bound to be referred to. This will screen out or demote for example low value information pages on law firm ‘brochure’ sites.
  • If you are researching local law, include UK or England or Scotland as appropriate as a search word. This will demote sites concerned with overseas jurisdictions, including of course US sites, but also Australian and Commonwealth sites whose terminology is more similar.

More about search engines

A wealth of information about search engines is on the SearchengineWatch site at www.searchenginewatch.com.