Finally another law blog from practising UK lawyers. Naked Law is written by members of Mills & Reeve’s Technology Team, based in Cambridge, about the latest UK legal/regulatory developments affecting the IT and other hi-tech industries, including procurement and outsourcing, exploitation and protection of intellectual property, privacy and data protection, e-commerce and distance selling, and e-government.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2005.
The ABA Law Practice Management Section leads its July/August issue with five feature articles on law blogging:
- It’s Not Your Father’s Web Site: Lawyers in the Blogosphere (how blogs differ from traditional websites)
- Ethics and Lawyer Blogs
- How to Start Your Own Weblog And Make the Most of It
- The Future of Legal Blogging (a discussion from the Between Lawyers Roundtable)
- Stepping onto the Cutting Edge (the first installment of the Blogger Diaries series)
Eversheds employment team has developed an online service designed for human resource professionals in large organisations that automates the process of drafting employment documents. See this walk-through demo of HR Contract Builder. The service uses the DealBuilder document automation system from Business Integrity.
Joy London cites these other DealBuilder legal applications: Linklaters (BlueFlag), Microsoft (software license agreements), Ashurst (share and asset purchase transactions), Freshfields (standard form precedents for the corporate practices in the UK, Austria and France), Nabarro Nathanson (standard form precedents), and Poyner & Spruill (e4Close online foreclosure system).
According to Charles Christian’s Legal Technology Insider Top 250 IT system chart DealBuilder is used by (at least) 7 of the top 40 law firms, behind the leader HotDocs with 16; bringing up the rear are GhostFill with 2 and Chameleon with 1; 14 are unspecified. Not surprisingly some firms have used more than one system.
Casting around for something new on the legal web, I recently came across the claim that www.civilappeals.gov.uk is “a new website”. It is no such thing! civilappeals.gov.uk is a new domain whose www points you to www.hmcourts-service.gov.uk/cms/civilappeals.htm – a page on HM Courts Service website with no separate identity. Whatever the merit of the new information provided – and there is a substantial amount – it is simply misleading to trumpet it as a new website. Either there is a case for a separate identity and a distinct website (HM Courts Services’ Money Claim Online is a good example), or there is not.
