Month: November 2008
Does price comparison work for legal services?
The price comparison website market has become highly competitive in the last few months and it is inevitable that the range of products and services on offer will soon extend into the legal market. The likes of Moneysupermarket and TESCOcompare are already planning to compare routine work like wills and conveyancing and it is only […]
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Alternative legal services – solicitors fight back
In the last two issues, we have heard from various suppliers of legal services who are reputable, serious and successful – but are not solicitors. Generally, these suppliers have identified particular types of legal work which can be standardised in some way and they are then able to attract customers, provide their product and collect […]
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Law Society Library Online
The idea of a joint project with one of the major legal publishers had been under consideration by the Law Society Library team for some time before the actual project kicked off in January 2007. Over the following 12 months the joint project team of Law Society Library staff and LexisNexis met on a weekly […]
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Developing a niche practice online
The rapid development of the internet is something which will radically change our working environment. To survive in this new world, solicitors must work with the new technologies to develop new ways to provide legal services. We need to be the innovators ourselves, using the solicitors brand as a guarantee of quality. This, however, needs […]
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Virtual in-house legal services
In my previous professional incarnation, as a European in-house counsel for an international telecommunications company, I noticed that many of the smaller telecommunications companies with whom my client did business, did not have their own in-house counsel, even though they knew that their businesses would benefit from the right type of legal support. Their reasoning […]
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Managing Web 2.0 risk
In very broad terms, the chief characteristic of Web 2.0 is the development of new ways of working ”” in particular, embracing new ways of interacting with clients. This approach is already being embraced in the commercial sector. As the prospect of volume legal service providers approaches, law firms will need to address this new […]
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A website as a marketing tool
Whilst many organisations are setting up multiple domain names and specialised websites to improve placement in the search engines, my firm, Wilson Nesbitt in Belfast, is deliberately going in the opposite direction and concentrating solely on the firm’s name as branding. Our online web presence has been growing significantly over the past 9 years in […]
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Google business tools
Google dominates the UK search marketplace, delivering more than 90 per cent of all search results, and it rates as one of the busiest sites in the world. But Google is much more than just a search engine. If also offers a range of office productivity tools which can make your information management more efficient, […]
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FreeLegalWeb
You might think that we have a thriving free legal web of legislation, judgments and other materials on OPSI, the SLD, BAILII and government websites, and thousands of useful free guides, articles and updaters published by law firms, barristers and other private law publishers. But it is not joined up. We have the resources and […]
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The games industry goes to war
You may have read about threats to the music industry over the years with file sharing companies such as Napster and Kazaa attempting to prevent copying. Now the games industry has joined the party. Its members have commenced a campaign in the UK which has resulted in thousands of individuals receiving letters of claim for […]
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Checklist for an intranet
Implementing an intranet is hard work; it spreads its tentacles right across the firm or chambers (or should do), it takes considerable skill on behalf of the people doing it, it is a major drain on their time and there are real costs (both staff time and IT related). 1. There needs to be somebody […]
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