2001

A Page on the Web, published in the Solicitors Journal, November 2001

BAILII

BAILII (www.bailii.org) should now be a familiar name to all. If not to you, then go to Laurie West-Knights pages at www.lawonline.cc/ukileli.htm for a run-down (he, the driving force behind it). A full transcript of the recent ‘Freeing the Law’ meeting is published there (www.lawonline.cc/freeingthelaw.htm) and provides a full, if not concise, summary of the current state of play. Unfortunately, guest speaker Michael Wills MP – one of the three Parliamentary Secretaries in the Lord Chancellor’s Department, responsible for the Court Service, for IT and e-Government policy – arrived late and had to leave early, thus depriving the eager crowd of the opportunity to elicit answers to specific questions such as those posed by Neil Cameron: ‘(a) Are the Government going to tell the Court Service to provide an electronic record of all court judgments to BAILII as a matter of course? It seems bloody obvious, and would cost very little. (b) [What is] the last word on the current status of the Government’s pronunciation on the Statute Law Database, and when it is going to be available? Is it still 12 to 18 months?’

Browsers

In the beginning there was Mosaic, then Netscape. Then Bill Gates claimed the internet as his own and we have Internet Explorer. Like it or loathe it, to surf the web you now click the ‘e’ icon. Although a faithful and significant band of users (14%) still persist in using Netscape, some developers do not trouble themselves to acknowledge this.

Building, construction and engineering

Adjudication.co.uk (www.adjudication.co.uk/) promotes the resolution of disputes by adjudication as described in Part II of the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996. The site provides case notes, links to legislation etc.

Corbett & Co (www.corbett.co.uk/) is a specialist construction law firm whose site includes discussion forums and links.

The Joint Contracts Tribunal (www.jctltd.co.uk/) produces standard forms of contracts, guidance notes and other standard documentation for use in the construction industry. Unfortunately, they’re not available in electronic form or otherwise from the JCT which ‘does not sell contracts directly, these are sold through our approved resellers’. Their newsletter is on the site in pdf.

Masons (www.masons.com/) is a specialist construction law firm and provide an Adjudication service, including case summaries, commentary and Q&A.

The Society of Construction Law (www.scl.org.uk/) – not to be confused with the Society for Computers and Law site (www.scl.org/) – publishes information related to the construction industry and links to relevant sites of interest.

Winward Fearon (www.winwardfearon.co.uk/) are construction law specialists with briefings, articles and cases and an impressive list of links.

C is for …

Civil procedure

Your first port of call should of course be the Lord Chancellor’s Department’s Civil Procedure Rules site (www.lcd.gov.uk/civil/procrules_fin/cprocfr.htm) where the consolidated Rules and associated PDs and amendment notes are published. The site has recently been revamped. Some of the more significant improvements are:

• top-of-page content indexes have been added
• amendments are ‘redlined’
• a complete set of zipped copies of the rules, correct as at each update from Day 1 in 1999, is now available from the site

Upcoming improvements are:

• from the next update, the static index will be fully html-linked
• the search engine will be ‘updated’ within the next few months.

Two other long-standing CPR sites deserve another mention. Firstly, LawOnLine (www.lawonline.cc/locked/cpr/woolf.htm) from Laurie West-Knights QC provides news and commentary on primary sites covering the Civil Procedure Rules and is updated frequently. A little patience is required to make ones way through the idiosyncratic structure.

Roger Horne’s Yet Another Woolf Site (opal.he.net/~hrothgar/YAWS/index/text.htm) is a version of the Rules and associated PDs and cases with added value hypertext links, cross-referencing just about everything to everything. An impressive and colourful display, though not for the unwary.

Compliance and regulation

Regulatory Law (www.regulatorylaw.co.uk/) is a web journal designed for practitioners representing clients before disciplinary tribunals, as well as to those involved in authorization, registration and admission procedures and those responsible for drawing up and administering regulatory and disciplinary procedures.

Compliance Exchange (www.compliance-exchange.com/) is a resource for compliance officers and other professionals who manage investments and for those who study, service or regulate investment business.

Also useful is the Directory of Ombudsmen (www.bioa.org.uk/) which provides details of and links to all members of the British and Irish Ombudsman Association.

A Page on the Web, published in the Solicitors Journal, October 2001

Advertising

Circa the year 2000 (or Y2K as we then knew it) the web was all about advertising. Here’s the way it turned out for some. Scenario 1: Have an idea; do persuasive business plan; raise £millions from easy-to-persuade venture capitalists and public; spend £millions on national advertising campaign; wait for sales; hope for break-even; go bust. Scenario 2: Have an idea; do business plan on back of fag packet; raise modest sum from family or friends; set up in back room; offer lots of free content; get lots of hits (eyeballs); sell some advertising; give lots of advertising space away; put up own ads; eyeballs turn out to be blind to web ads; give back room back to the kids and go back to day job.

Anchors

Anchors are the most ubiquitous code on the web, being the ends of web links. What separates the web from most other markup languages is its features for hypertext and interactive documents. Although a simple concept, the link has been one of the primary forces driving the success of the web. A link starts at the ‘source’ anchor and points to the ‘destination’ anchor, which may be any web resource (eg an HTML document, an element within an HTML document, an image, a video clip, a program, etc.)

Arbitration resources

Atkinson Law (www.atkinson-law.com) contains legal information on construction, commerce and disputes resolution. Allows easy access to law and an introduction to common contract and legal problems in commerce, construction, standard forms of contract, arbitration, adjudication, mediation and conciliation and other forms of ADR.

The Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution (www.cedr.co.uk/) is an independent non-profit organisation supported by multinational business and leading professional bodies. CEDR’s mission is to encourage and develop mediation and other cost-effective dispute resolution and prevention techniques in commercial and public-sector disputes.

The Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (www.arbitrators.org/) is the professional body whose object is to promote and facilitate the determination of disputes by ADR.

The Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, Scottish Branch (www.scottish-arbitrators.org) aims to promote the use of arbitration in Scotland as a means of dispute resolution, both domestically and internationally. Access to the Scottish Arbitration Code.

The ICC International Court of Arbitration (www.iccwbo.org/index_court.asp) is the world’s foremost institution in the resolution of international business disputes. Composed of members from some 60 countries and every continent, the ICC Court is the world’s most widely representative dispute resolution institution.

Linklaters’ Dispute Toolkit (www.linklaters.com/disputetoolkit/) provides precedents with explanatory texts for: arbitration clauses, jurisdiction clauses, ADR clauses, boilerplate clauses dealing with governing law, sovereign immunity and service of process with explanatory text; links to more than 100 dispute related websites

The London Court of International Arbitration (www.lcia-arbitration.com) provides a comprehensive international dispute resolution service, both under its own Rules and under the UNCITRAL Rules, for operation under any system of law in any venue throughout the world.

Lovells’ Arbitration (www.lovells.com/Arbitration/SilverStream/Pages/pgHome.html) provides guidance and information on drafting arbitration agreements for inclusion in international commercial contracts; texts of arbitration laws (with summaries) and procedural rules; and a drafting engine, which may be used to prepare an arbitration agreement.

Masons’ Adjudication Service (www.masons.com/php/page.php3?page_id=8479) includes case summaries and links to full text, articles and frequently asked questions.

Arbitration and mediation services

adjudication.co.uk (www.adjudication.co.uk) is a recognised adjudicator nominating body and the leading provider of adjudication services and information.

ADR Chambers (UK) Ltd (www.adrchambers.co.uk/) is an umbrella group consisting of retired Law Lords, Lords Justices, High Court Judges, Circuit Court Judges and other retired judges, as well as retired and practising barristers and solicitors who are trained and dedicated to helping parties resolve disputes in an expeditious and cost-effective manner.

ADR Group (www.adrgroup.co.uk) is a specialist mediation provider, arranging mediations in disputes relating to banking/financial services, insurance, construction, probate, computer law, contract disputes, medical negligence, personal injury, professional negligence, and all other commercial disputes.

Arbitration a Commercial Initiative (ACI) (www.aci-arb.com) are dedicated arbitrators within the broad field of contractual and commercial law.

Consensus Mediation (www.consensus.uk.com/) is a commercial mediation practice – solicitor mediators; includes checklist, tips and FAQs.

Construction Contracts Mediators’ Group (CCMG) (www.ccmg.co.uk) provides access to a group of mediators who specialise in construction contract disputes.

Consensus Mediation.com (www.consensus.uk.com/) was the UK’s first online dispute resolution service.

Global Mediation Ltd (www.globalmediation.co.uk) are mediators for commercial, financial services, employment, education, healthcare and professional negligence disputes.

In Place of Strife (www.mediate.co.uk) is a commercial mediation service provider.

Independent Mediation for Clinical Disputes (www.imcd.co.uk) is a specialist mediation, conciliation and arbitration service provider for clinical negligence and personal injury disputes.

David I Shapiro (www.mediatewithshapiro.com) is an arbitrator in commercial disputes. Consultant, Solicitor Advocate, accredited as a mediator by CEDR, honorary member of the ADR Group, founder-member of The Panel of Independent Mediators, member of the Panel of Distinguished Mediators, CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution (New York), Fellow of the International Academy of Mediators and member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators.

Nationwide Mediation (www.mediationuk.com) are specialists in resolving financial disputes in the fields of matrimonial, employment, professional partnership, corporate, professional negligence, medical negligence.

Peter Aeberli (www.aeberli.co.uk) is a practising barrister, arbitrator, mediator and adjudicator, specialising in construction law.

Syndicus (www.syndicus.co.uk) are consultants and practitioners in complaints handling, dispute resolution and training.

The Association of Northern Mediators (www.northernmediators.co.uk) are civil and commercial mediators in the North of England.

The Centre for Business Arbitration (www.arbitration.lincolns-inn.com) is a panel of arbitrators in business, property and commercial matters.

Work it Out (www.workitout.co.uk/) are mediators for personal injury and clinical negligence disputes.

A Page on the Web, published in the Solicitors Journal, September 2001

I have busied myself recently with the redesign and relaunch of the infolaw website. The main purpose of the site, since its inception in February 1995, has always been to provide ready access to free UK legal resources on the web – a portal in current parlance. The old site did so by means of a set of static web page indexes. The new site has considerably wider coverage. In addition to the general legal resources formerly on the site, it indexes primary law and other official documents, forms and precedents and other materials. These indexes are managed in a database and intuitive methods of browsing and searching this are provided.

Coincidentally, the latest issue of Computers & Law (vol 12 issue 3, Aug/Sep 2001) dropped on my desk this week, containing two (as we will see, related) articles concerned with issues of direct import to the infolaw site and to UK legal portals in general.

Free access law services

Laurence Eastham argues in his editorial that although there are substantial free legal materials on the web:

• the long-term commitment of the commercial publishers to free access services is suspect; and
• many lawyers are ignorant of the ‘genuine’ free access services and there is therefore a need for an effective marketing drive to ‘sell’ their free gifts.

The commercial publishers’ free services are essentially marketing tools, designed to hook users in and drive them to purchase the publisher’s chargeable services. By contrast, the aim of the genuine free services is to facilitate access to the law, either out of public duty or out of charitable intent. There are, of course, grey areas in between occupied by, amongst others, the hobbyist, the exhibitionist etc, but the prime distinction is between commercial and non-commercial publishers.

The more commercial the publisher, the less useful the ‘free’ information ultimately is, as not only will the publisher have an interest in extracting value out of the user, with the likelihood of withdrawal of the free services also ever present, but they will also strongly assert their copyrights and other publishing rights in the material, limiting the use of that information.

Deep linking

Another C&L article in the same issue by Ian Jeffrey concerns the significance of the database right (incorporated from EC Council Directive into the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988) for online publishers.

Even a basic website may fall within the definition of a ‘database’ as it has a logical structure. Provided there has been a substantial investment in compiling and presenting the information, the database right will subsist and will be infringed if there is an unauthorised extraction or re-utilisation of all or a substantial part of it. Further, repeated extraction of small parts may amount to re-utilisation. The latter, in particular, has significant implications for the online portal.

Much of the value of the web lies in the ability to link disparate pages, not just on the ‘home’ site, but anywhere on the web. As the web grows and websites become more dense and complex, links to home pages become less and less useful for the researcher (as opposed to the online ‘shopper’). Any sufficiently focussed portal or other specialist site will therefore usually include direct links to pages within a website – this process being known as ‘deep’ linking. Potentially therefore, deep linking, if substantial, can infringe a linked site’s database right.

The more commercial the linked site and the more closely the linking site is seen to compete with it, the more likely it is that the linked site will assert its database right. Commercial publishers want you to enter via their home pages, as there you will get the corporate message, there you will be guided as the publisher intended, there you will see the adverts intended and there you will start to clock up that most precious of website statistics, the page view.

By contrast, deep linking benefits the user. For example, in providing a reference to the present two C&L articles, I could point you to the Society for Computers and Law’s site at www.scl.org. [However, you would then need to click on Publications, then SCL magazine, then click on Other issues: 2, then locate the appropriate links within the contents list and click them. I prefer therefore to refer you direct to the pages in question: Laurence Eastham's editorial and Ian Jeffrey's database right article.] You found that much more useful, didn’t you? But if I do that too often on a web page, I may be in trouble.

Search engines deep link all the time, since their crawlers find and do not just index home pages, but follow all links, down to a certain level, to individual pages on the site in non-protected areas. Have you ever heard anyone complain that pages on their site appear in a major search engine? I suspect not! However, a publisher who sees a specialist portal as a competitor may well object since the value of the resulting visit will be diminished. If objection is well-founded, the linking site may well remove all the links and there will be no resulting visits and no value! Or the parties may agree some form of license, the fee for which the linking site will somehow have to recoup.

So, as we said at the start, the lunch is not free after all.

Note: Article amended December 2001 following relaunch of new SCL website!

A Page on the Web, published in the Solicitors Journal, July 2001

I first read about the web in an article in the Guardian in December 1993. This was just the ticket. Built on the internet – a network of networks that could connect everybody together – the enticing thing about the web (which in technical terms comprises the hypertext transfer protocol (http) and the standard hypertext markup language (html) developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory) was the ease with which any page anywhere in the world could be linked with any page elsewhere in the world.

The web had been fully operational since May 1991 on a single server at CERN. By the time of the article in late 1993 there over 500 web servers, its popularity encouraged by the development of the graphical Mosaic web browser earlier that year by Marc Andreessen (later to found Netscape). Since that time the web has roughly doubled in size every since months, growing to an estimated 24 million web servers by April 2001.

The web is a very different place to what it was in the mid 90s. The initial vision was of a medium for ‘serious research’. So much so that when the ability to link in and display images was added Berners-Lee was dismayed at this triviality.

Having now established itself as the global communications medium, the web is used for anything and everything from serious to light-hearted, useful to trivial, altruistic to exploitative. But serious research remains a key use of the web, particularly so for the professional user.

One of the key benefits of the web for research purposes is that a document need only be published once. That document can then be directly referenced by anyone. If value is to be added, there is in theory no need to reprocess and republish the document, since it can be processed ‘on the fly’ and redisplayed with value added.

It is therefore surprising that the publication of much of the law, both primary and secondary, which it is acknowledged should be accessible to all, has been approached in an unstructured fashion, significantly diminishing its potential utility.

For optimum accessibility what is required is that:

• each document should have a permanent web reference which can readily be inferred from a standard neutral citation
• an index displaying the key metadata associated with the document (as a minimum its title, citation, date and subject) should be published

This is not, in my view, much to ask . However, as will be seen in the accompanying examples, while HMSO largely meets these requirements, other primary law publishers do not.

Of course a friendly means of accessing each database – via browsable indexes, a structured search template or other site search engine – should be provided. However, these will be local solutions based on perceived requirements for accessing a particular set of documents. It is far more important that the documents should be readily identifiable and accessible in the first place so that others may develop access solutions (across these databases) best suited to their requirements.

The structure of law on the web – examples

HMSO: UK Acts

UK Acts can be accessed at http://www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk/ in the acts/ folder.

The Social Security Contributions (Share Option) Act 2001 (citation: 2001 c. 20) will be found at acts2001/20010001.htm.

House of Lords judgments

Found at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/ in the pa/ (parliament) folder.

Regina v. Lambert (neutral citation 2001 UKHL 37) is found at ld200102/ldjudgmt/jd010705/regina-1.htm (ie filed by parliamentary session, then by date, then by filename – unrelated to the neutral citation).

The Court Service judgments

These are in a Lotus Notes database, found at http://porch.ccta.gov.uk/courtser/judgements.nsf/ in an unmemorable folder named 5cbcc578c01a9c02802567170061b8c6/

Neil Hamilton v. Mohamed Al Fayed (a 2001 judgment of the Queen’s Bench Division – no neutral citation yet) is found at ed700e766d79173f80256a88004a6be3?OpenDocument and from thence to ed700e766d79173f80256a88004a6be3$FILE/queens_hamilton.htm

A Page on the Web, published in the Solicitors Journal, June 2001

The Office of the e-Envoy (www.e-envoy.gov.uk) is leading the drive to get the UK online, to ensure that the country, its citizens and its businesses derive maximum benefit from the knowledge economy.

The Government’s programme to ensure that the UK is a world leader in the new knowledge economy is the UK Online Strategy. The Strategy, which was published as part of the e-Minister and e-Envoy’s first Annual Report in September 2000, sets out 94 recommendations for action across the e-agenda, grouped under 25 key priority areas. Priority area 11 is to ‘Get all Government Services online’ which includes the following five commitments.

Improve the customer front-end

‘Develop the UK Online portal to provide citizens with a single point of access to Government information and services available online.’

The UK Online portal (www.ukonline.gov.uk) was launched on 19 February 2001 as the principal entry point to online government information and services. Its aim is to organise content around the needs of the citizen, to make dealing with government as easy and seamless as possible. Building on recommendations in the Modernising Government White Paper, information is focused around ‘Life Episodes’, which are designed to enable the user to access all the information they need about a particular event without having to understand the workings of government or departmental delivery structures. There are currently eight Life Episodes: Moving home, Going away, Dealing with crime, Having a baby, Death and bereavement, Learning to drive, Looking for/getting a job and Looking after someone. Three more are due for release by the Autumn: Pensions and retirement, Starting/changing school and Moving on from school.

For example, selecting the life episode ‘Death and bereavement’ and sub-topic ‘Planning ahead’ one is offered checkboxes to select the jurisdiction (where the death has occurred!) and more specific sub-topics of interest. This search then produces annotated links to directly relevant government and other services. Under the head ‘Wills, legal issues and financial planning’ one finds:

• Legal advice: find a solicitor in England or Wales – a link to the Law Society’s solicitors-online.com website.
• Legal advice on wills and probate – a link to the Community Legal Service’s Just Ask! website.
• How to trace a will – an e-mail link to the Northern Ireland Probate Registry.
• A guide to wills – a link to the guideforlife.com website.

Alternatively the Quick find search facility can be used, eg to search for “wills death”.

The site does not impress, breaking many of the rules for good usability, with non-standard, disjointed and slow browsing, no Search box on the home page, and too much bright yellow! For starters will the average citizen find resonance in the term ‘life episodes’?

To date the e-Envoy reports 6.8 million page impressions – or 0.125 per citizen (since February).

The site is not yet of much direct relevance to the citizen as businessperson, though this should change soon: the open.gov.uk service will be hosted by ukonline.gov.uk from 1 July 2001.

Join up the back-office systems

‘Develop a Government Gateway to provide a single standard of security and authentication and to join up existing IT systems in Departments.’

The Government Gateway project (www.gateway.gov.uk) is designed to join up back office IT systems in Departments making it easier for citizens to connect with public services through single points of access such as the UK Online portal. This is intended to contribute to the drive to make services from across Government available in a consistent, direct and joined-up way.

The first three online Government services available through the Government Gateway are:

• Electronic VAT Return (for VAT-registered businesses)
• MAFF IACS Area Aid Application (for farmers, and agents who complete MAFF forms on behalf of farmers)
• PAYE Internet Services (for employers and their agents)

You can enroll for and access these three services through the Government Gateway using a single account login. Further transactions and additional departments (including Devolved Administrations and Local Authorities) will be added later in 2001 and the list of services will grow until ‘almost all the paperwork that you currently send off to Government departments will be available online’.

The initial version of the Government Gateway enables forms to be sent one-way – to Government departments. Later in 2001 the facility to receive forms and statements electronically from Government departments is to be provided.

The lead developer for the Gateway is none other than our friend Bill Gates, sparking lively debate about whether our interests are best served by this appointment.

Other commitments

The other three commitments under the heading Getting Government Services online are:

• Set standards: the e-government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF) mandates the use of Internet, World Wide Web and XML standards across the public sector.
• Improve the organisational capacity of Government to deliver electronic services: this has started with the production of initial departmental e-business strategies and formation of e-business units.
• Champion private and voluntary sector involvement in the delivery of electronic government services: an e-government incubator has been established rapidly to fund and develop, jointly with the private and voluntary sectors, prototypes from the public, the private and the voluntary sectors.

A Page on the Web, published in the Solicitors Journal, May 2001

Last month we looked at the extent to which you might meet prospective clients’ expectations for free online legal advice and information. Let’s turn the tables and see what legal information you can reasonably expect to be provided free on the web.

A public service?

The government has an obligation to make the law of the land accessible to the citizen and, while there may be some argument as to how far this obligation extends towards providing all-singing, all-dancing versions of all the law on the web, at least a start has been made by HMSO, the Court Service, the Lord Chancellors Department. There are many shortcomings in the extent, format and utility of these resources for the lawyer and in the short term these deficiencies are being addressed by other non-commercial and commercial web publishers.

The government is also committed to an ambitious program for modernising government and making all Government services available online by 2005 which will improve the scope and utility of services pertinent to lawyering. See the Modernising Government site at www.cabinet-office.gov.uk/moderngov/ and the Office of the e-Envoy site at www.e-envoy.gov.uk/.

There are many public service, charitable, academic and individual websites providing information services of use to the lawyer. The difficulty is in finding and collating specific information from these disparate resources in the first place.

On the primary law front, the principal non-commercial legal information provider is of course BAILII, the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (www.bailii.org), who are some way towards compiling a full text database of all publicly available primary law and further primary materials provided by arrangement with other publishers. BAILII thus improves on the public primary law information services by not only (in due course) providing a service wider in scope, but more importantly, bringing all these materials together in one place in a uniform searchable format.

Before looking at the commercial sector, let’s consider information services provided by associations to which you belong. The ‘free’ services they provide will ultimately be paid for out of your subscription fee; anything beyond what this covers will be run as a commercial service – as already is the case for example with Law Society Publishing.

A free lunch?

Assuming, as we must, that commercial organisations are driven by the great god Profit, why should they provide information services for free? Because they calculate that (one way or another) these services will improve their bottom line, if not in the short-term, at least in the medium to longer term.

Many new legal information services set up in the last 18 months – at least up and till early this year – assumed they could generate sufficient advertising revenues to support their free services. This has proved not to be the case. Nor have affiliate schemes (eg referral services paid for by the referee) generated much revenue.

So the old maxim applies: there is no such thing as a free lunch. But with the competition for your ‘eyeball’ so increased by the internet you can reasonably expect a free ‘starter’. For example:

• free tasters – demos, samples and trial periods are provided by most publishers
• free online update etc services complementing or supporting existing (hardcopy or electronic) subscription services
• substantial useful free content, falling short of giving away the silverware, designed to push you towards chargeable services.

… or a considered marketing device?

Butterworths’ free online service is LawDirect (macdonald.butterworths.co.uk). This effectively comprises a free front end to their range of subscription services. Butterworths online publishing is based around a highly structured database of legal materials, including cases, statutes, SIs, EU materials, quasi-legal materials and articles, and the LawDirect gives access to these up to summary level. A search on LawDirect produces alphabetical listings within category of the titles of matching documents and thence summary information is available. LawDirect also includes a customisable daily update service of materials added to the database, a Bill Tracker, the Is it in Force? database and a library of free forms (from the EveryForm site, but to be integrated into LawDirect in future). It is of substantial use in its own right but in the main all onward links are to Butterworths chargeable services.

By contrast Sweet & Maxwell’s free online services (www.sweetandmaxwell.co.uk) are somewhat ad hoc. It provides numerous online newsletters, a weekly Case Check service, a Crown Court Alerting Service (court listings) and various free online updates to subscription-based works published in hard copy and on CD or online.

Free resources of note from other major legal publishers are Smith Bernal’s Casebase database (www.casetrack.com/casebase/) of CA and HC judgments from 1996 to 1999 (now also included in the BAILII service – see above), and the Incorporated Council of law Reporting’s Daily Law Notes (WLR case summaries) (www.lawreports.co.uk).

You get what you pay for

So there is plenty of free legal information out there for you to enjoy, but it is time-consuming to find and use and will rarely fully satisfy your needs. If your budget is limited you need not be pushed into the arms of the larger commercial publishers, but the new breed of aspirant web publishers seeking to attract you with free services are coming down to earth and realising that they too must look to you to pay.

A Page on the Web, published in the Solicitors Journal, April 2001

The culture of the internet is such that expectations are that most information is free. But these expectations also extend beyond information to just about anything that can be delivered over the internet: including advice, documents, software to name but a few.

But if your business is the provision of legal advice, how do you meet these expectations and profit from your online business? If you have managed to tap into the much vaunted global market, how do you convert casual visitors to clients? How much advice should you give away?

What follows is not an attempt to tell you how to run your business, rather to highlight the fact that online business requires new thinking.

A problem to be solved

The online brochure, while an essential base, is inadequate in itself for developing productive online business. Most individuals who find your site, whether by accident or design, will have a specific problem which they want solved, and it should be your aim to help them solve it in the most effective manner. In general, describing your services, telling them you can solve their problem and providing contact details – even if they include mailback links – is not the most effective use of the medium. Web users want immediate gratification and to satisfy this need and engage them you must provide substance.

How much will it cost?

At this point it is worth stating that although people will expect some level of free information or advice, most will be willing to pay for services which they understand are not readily available for free elsewhere – provided costs are reasonable, competitive and so far as possible quantifiable in advance.

Thus, a key aspect of the information you provide, in general terms and in relation to specific matters, should be a clear explanation of the costs they will incur, ie your charges, with of course an explanation of conditional fee agreements, the Community Legal Services Fund and available free advice schemes.

Because the internet enables you to deliver services in many different ways and more readily to exploit technology, you should consider packaging your services accordingly by developing fixed fee services – to which web users are more receptive. The internet is ideally suited to providing automated quotations, so if you have fixed fee scales, no matter how complex the underlying calculation, you (ie your technology) can instantly quote the prospective purchaser a price, as well as advising all additional disbursements etc.

Free initial advice by email

A number of firms offer to provide free initial advice by email as a way of encouraging new business. But how much advice is ‘initial advice’ and is this business worth having? The user is unlikely to be satisfied with a cursory reply and an invitation formally to instruct you. But you probably cannot afford to give every enquirer the equivalent time you might otherwise have spent on an initial free interview in person. Because email communication is so easy, you may well find yourself being pestered for further advice from a user from whom there is no prospect of gaining business. If you do choose this course, it is best to be absolutely clear on what level of advice will be provided and/or how much time you are prepared to give for free, with a unit rate for (email) time thereafter.

Free online advice and documents

More widely employed is the provision of free information and documents online. The disadvantages of this approach compared with email contact are that you do not know precisely who is seeking your advice and do not directly engage them in a dialogue, but the advantages – if effectively implemented – are more significant:

• You engage the user immediately.
• The user remains in control.
• You do not spend time satisfying visitors. In particular you don’t waste time on casual visitors and freeloaders.
• The increased content on your site improves your ranking with search engines, and the likelihood that you will be listed in directories and ‘useful links’ libraries, thus generating additional traffic to your site.

I would say that you do not gain much unless you publish a substantial amount of information. Any form of summary, lacking detail, will leave the user dissatisfied, quite possibly with a negative impression of your site (ie of your firm). At the other extreme, you will probably believe it counter-productive to go so far as to publish a full DIY guide.

I would favour the structured checklist approach, ie a step-by-step description of the activities necessary to progress the matter, with references to appropriate forms, fees, agencies etc involved. The brevity and layout of checklists are ideal for the short attention span of the web user. Although you will author these yourself, there is also much useful information available on official websites to which you can link. Don’t simply provide links pointing to home or base pages as these will interrupt the flow of information and quite likely divert the user from the task at hand; establish the URLs of the specific pages or documents which directly complement or support your text and effectively incorporate them into your site. Examples might be specific forms and leaflets on the Court Service Forms & Leaflets site (see www.courtservice.gov.uk/fandl/forms_home.htm) or information on the Community Services Fund on the Legal Services Commission site (see www.legalservices.gov.uk/leaflets/index.htm).

Making it pay

Having provided a substantial and useful base of free information, you can then seamlessly extend the service, adding chargeable services, eg downloadable documents, chargeable email advice, interactive online questionnaires etc. Thus your free information service is transformed into a genuine online business.

A Page on the Web, published in the Solicitors Journal, March 2001

Government portals

Last month’s review of UK legal portals would not be complete without covering government sites. While designed for the citizen rather than the lawyer, government portals provide access to so much information vital to lawyering that they are an essential legal research tool. Of the following portals only LEXicon is primarily designed for lawyers.

open.gov.uk
(www.open.gov.uk)

Run by the CCTA Government Information Service, this is a comprehensive site for access to all government departments and agencies. There are also links to hundreds of related organisations. Listings are arranged both by organisation and by topic, including in particular the Law and Justice topic.

Direct Access Government
(www.dag-business.gov.uk)

The ‘DAG’ site is created by the Government Better Regulation Unit to provide direct access to a wide range of government regulations and documents and many of the forms commonly needed.

Although thousands of useful documents are maintained here, this site is tedious to navigate. If you’re keen for quicker access and up for a bit of detective work, go directly to the FTP site at ftp.open.gov.uk/pub/.

LEXicon
(www.courtservice.gov.uk/lexicon)

LEXicon, from the Court Service in association with Butterworths, gives access to selected legal information online. It has been designed for the judiciary of England and Wales. Links are grouped under UK, European, International and Human Rights and then categorised by type.

UK Online: Citizen Portal
(www.ukonline.gov.uk)

This is a new Government portal site offering easy access to all government information for the citizen. In terms of resources, essentially this points you to relevant indexes on the open.gov and DAG sites (see above). There is also a feature pointing you to government resources thematically via ‘Life’s Episodes’.

Designed to annoy

Flash intros

Picture this: Variously shaped objects move in from the edges of the screen and combine to form a nicely designed logo. Gradually some text appears – with luck, the name you were expecting. Finally a button appears inviting you to Enter. This is the Flash intro, one of the worst curses of current web design. Of Flash, web usability guru Jakob Nielsen says: ‘About 99% of the time, the presence of Flash on a website constitutes a usability disease. … In most cases, we would be better off if these multimedia objects were removed.’

Flash degrades websites by encouraging design abuse, preventing interaction, distracting attention and delaying user gratification.

Don’t blame the designer for this. The bosses thought it looked nice at the boardroom presentation … but then they never used the website.

If faced with a Flash intro as a user, there’s not much you can do save watch out for a ‘Skip Intro’ button. If you’ll want to revisit the site, be sure to bookmark the next page rather than the base page.

‘Your browser does not support frames’

Assuming you are not stuck with 1995 technology you should never as a user encounter this message when accessing a web page. However, check any listing of websites found with a search engine and a surprising number will display some such text. This is because the default page on a framed site need not contain any text, just a definition of which frames go where. The above message remains the default ‘no frames’ text for frameset pages in many web design templates. But search engines index these pages, so your frameset page should include no frames text equivalent to that which appears on your home page. As well as displaying meaningful text in the search engine results page, this will also improve your search engine ranking.

Check this out and fix it if you’re a website owner of a framed site.

‘This site requires IE4 or above’

Now that Bill Gates has all but won the browser war, this message is increasingly common if you use any browser other than Internet Explorer. Most users faced with this message will simply leave the site immediately.

But that extra percentage of the market is important to you, so insist that your site is compatible with browsers at least as far back as 18 months old. Currently that includes Netscape 4.x.

‘This site utilises the latest technology’

So starts a gem I encountered recently, which continues ‘… and is all driven from a Microsoft SQL Server 7 database, with a layer of Active Server Pages that calls the data.’ Not a design sin, this attitude does though demonstrate a remarkable lack of marketing sense. Why should the user care?

Don’t make the mistake of thinking your users will welcome your interests, whether they be technology, horse racing, bungee jumping or whatever.