2002

From December 1995 to February 2002 I had a long spell as the web columnist for the Solicitors Journal, my “Pages on the Web” appearing monthly. My final fling – an A to Z of the legal web, was cut short when they ditched the column.

A Page on the Web, published in the Solicitors Journal, February 2002

E is for ‘electronic’, or rather ‘using the internet to undertake’ – as in ‘e-commerce’. (Now that doing business on the internet is commonplace, the term ‘e-commerce’ has lost its cachet and I suspect will soon fall into disuse.) This month we look at other ‘e-’ phrases in the news.

e-Government

The Office of the e-Envoy (www.e-envoy.gov.uk) is leading the Government’s online strategy and has three core objectives:

• to make the UK the best environment in the world for e-commerce by 2002
• to ensure that everyone who wants it has access to the internet by 2005
• to make all government services available electronically by 2005

Regarding the latter, the e-Envoy claims that:

‘the UK now has in place the most advanced e-government infrastructure in the world. The first stage of the Government Gateway was completed, on time, on scope and on budget in January 2001 and registration, enrolment and transaction handling are fully operational.’

Registering with the Government Gateway (www.gateway.gov.uk) enables you to sign up for any of the UK Government’s services that are available over the internet. These are:

• Inland Revenue PAYE
• Inland Revenue Self-Assessment
• VAT returns
• the DEFRA Integrated Administration and Control System Area Aid Application

I have personal experience of preparing and submitting (e-filing) my Self Assessment return online and have to report that it all worked smoothly. Although other software may be used, the IR’s own online forms work well and save your work in progress after each page is completed and validated. At present only the main return and Self Employment supplement are operational.

e-Justice

The Court Service this month took a significant step towards delivering access to justice over the internet with the launch of its Money Claims Online (MCOL) service (www.courtservice.gov.uk/mcol/). The service can be used by individuals or businesses, or their solicitors, if they are issuing a claim for a fixed amount of money. Where a claim has been issued online they can also enter judgment, file an acknowledgement of service or defence and apply for a warrant of execution online.

Claims are entered over a series of pages, each of which is validated and saved as you move to the next. Court fees are calculated. There is extensive online help and links to other parts of the Court Service site where appropriate. Saved draft claims may be revisited and continued or deleted up to submission stage.

All claims submitted online are processed through the County Court Bulk Centre in the name of Northampton County Court, to take advantage of its existing technology and the staff’s experience of administering a centralised system. An advantage of this is that the claim will usually be issued, printed and posted to the defendant on the day the request is submitted.

e-Conveyancing

With the Land Registration Act 2002 just about to reach the statute books, ‘e-conveyancing’ is on many lips. The Land Registration Bill creates a framework in which it will be possible to transfer and create interests in registered land by electronic means. It does so by enabling the formal documents to be executed electronically; and providing for a secure electronic communications network. Access to the network will be controlled by the Land Registry, who will also be obliged to make arrangements for those who wish to undertake their own conveyancing. The system will be introduced in stages, starting with the simplest transactions and progressing to the more complex and the Bill provides for the Lord Chancellor to regulate by rules transactions that can be carried out electronically. The Lord Chancellor will have power to make the use of electronic means for conveyancing compulsory in due course.

A very useful site for the aspirant e-conveyancer is Propert-e, developed jointly by EGi and Wragge & Co (www.egi.co.uk/properte.asp), which aims to provide comprehensive news, articles and analysis on the latest developments in electronic conveyancing. This free site also includes links to relevant legislation, consultation papers and other valuable resources.

A Page on the Web, published in the Solicitors Journal, January 2002

Databases

Databases are ubiquitous on the web. There were of course countless databases maintained for publishing, information and sales purposes before the web entered the public consciousness. Many of these same databases are now searchable from the organisations’ websites and many others have been constructed in recent years to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the new medium.

It is also the case that many websites now are almost entirely ‘driven’ by databases. That is to say the viewable web pages are constructed on the fly from data and text pages held in a database.

It is worth bearing in mind, by users and publishers alike, that the web search engines cannot index data in a database; they can only index static web pages or pages that result when a link is clicked. Thus publishers and developers should ensure that additional structured index pages are published sufficient to generate all the information that they wish to be indexed.

Directories

One of the more common manifestations of the database on the web is the directory. For the lawyer, as for users generally, web directories enable details of relevant authorities and services to be found much more quickly and reliably than formerly, with the added benefit that the information should (in theory) be bang up to date. The utility of these directories will depend firstly on their provenance (are they comprehensive and reliable?) and secondly on their content and functionality (do they contain the information you want and can you find it easily?). Official directories will in general be comprehensive and reliable, though they may not always contain the information required or they may be poorly presented or not easily searchable. Thus well-established commercial directories will still have a place in your bookmarks.

Following are a number of official directories to note:

• Police Services at www.police.uk
• Prisons at www.hmprisonservice.gov.uk/prisons/
• County Courts at www.courtservice.gov.uk/notices/county/ccadd/circuits.htm
• Crown Courts at www.courtservice.gov.uk/notices/crown/crwn_crt_add.htm
• Sheriffs at www.sheriffs.org.uk/
• Bailiffs at www.bailiffs.org.uk/membdir.htm
• District Land Registries at www.landreg.gov.uk/regional/
• Health Authorities at www.nhs.uk/localnhsservices/ and www.wales.nhs.uk/org.cfm
• Charities at www.charity-commission.gov.uk/registeredcharities/

Law directories

Of particular interest to you from a promotional point of view are the law directories. You should, of course, have an automatic listing in the Law Society’s Solicitors-Online Directory at www solicitors-online.com, in the Community Legal Services’ Just Ask! directory at www.justask.org.uk/public/en/directory/ if you hold or have committed to the CLS Quality Mark, and in other directories maintained by associations to which you belong.

You will probably also have a free listing in a number of major commercial directories, the leading commercial online law directory at present being Marindale Hubble’s LawyerLocator at www.lawyerlocator.co.uk/.

There are many other online directories of law firms who will be happy to add your details for free, though you are unlikely to get much business from them unless they are well marketed and heavily visited. Other sites may tempt you to pay for a listing or a place on a panel and promise actively to promote your services. Needless to say such services need to be carefully evaluated

Website links

Increasingly, potential clients surfing the web or using the above directories will be interested only in those firms who have an online presence (or at least, fail to be impressed by those that do not). So if you maintain a website, be sure to visit all directories in which you have a listing and check that your site is correctly linked. Some of the commercial directories will charge you for this.

My company, infolaw, has recently completed a review and revamp of our well-established Lawyers on the Web directories at www.infolaw.co.uk – listing only those firms with websites.

In the course of the review, we conducted many thousands of web searches to track down elusive web addresses, checked all links and visited many hundreds of new and suspect sites.

Significant findings were that:

• Over 1500 firms in England and Wales now have websites (representing about 19% of registered firms).
• Some 5% of top 500 UK law firms appear not to have websites.
• More than 13% of sole practitioners have websites – ie not far off the average for the profession as a whole.
• A substantial number of firms have effectively abandoned former domain names. By all means host your site under a new domain name, but do point or forward requests to the old domain to the new site!
• Many other directories include many bad and out of date links, including links to non-lawyers.
• The Law Society’s Solicitors-Online directory includes only a small proportion of members’ web addresses.