Author: Nick Holmes
Nick Holmes is Editor of this Newsletter. He is a publishing consultant specialising in the legal sector and is Managing Director of legal web services company infolaw Limited. Email nickholmes@infolaw.co.uk. Twitter @nickholmes.
Access to justice through technology: the providers
The Law Society, in its report Technology, Access to Justice and the Rule of Law, published September 2019, defines the “Access to Justice Sector” as “Comprised of all organisations supplying access to justice services. It includes law firms, Not for Profits, individual practitioner barristers and solicitors, in-house legal teams, government bodies, academics, LawTech businesses and […]
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The Online Court and the digitisation of justice
In its Report to the Civil Justice Council in February 2015, Online Dispute Resolution for Low Value Civil Claims, the ODR Advisory Group, chaired by Prof Richard Susskind recommended the establishment by HMCTS of an online court for low value civil claims, called HM Online Court (HMOC). This would overcome the fact that current practice […]
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The Web at 30
12 March 2019 marked the 30th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal envisioning a unifying structure for linking information across different computers using hypertext, which by 1991 had been developed and became known as the World Wide Web. The day was marked by three celebratory events around the world, all attended by Tim: at CERN in […]
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Regulating the interwebs
The House of Lords, in its 9 March report Regulating in a digital world concludes that “the digital world does not merely require more regulation but a different approach to regulation.” It proposes “an agreed set of 10 principles that shape and frame all regulation of the internet, and a new Digital Authority to oversee […]
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The open web (we wish)
The inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, and others advocated that the underlying code for the web should be made open – publicly available on a royalty-free basis, forever. His employer, CERN, concurred and announced this in April 1993, thus sparking a global wave of creativity, collaboration and innovation on a scale not seen before. […]
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The new Venables website
Delia Venables’ long-standing and, many would say, iconic Legal Resources website has been relaunched at www.venables.co.uk. First published in 1995 when the legal web was in its infancy, it has grown continually in scope and size and now contains several hundred pages of listings, describing tens of thousands of websites. It remains one of the […]
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The Newsletter way back
A snapshot of the type of content provided by the Newsletter in its early days is reproduced below from an old page on Delia’s site, retrieved courtesy of the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine. It is notable that the range of topics covered is similar to today’s mix. The main difference is that the internet was […]
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Why blog?
Blogging is a simple, cheap, efficient, effective way to publish and update time-sensitive information, particularly in constantly-changing fields such as the law. Blogging puts in your hands publishing power even greater than that which was the preserve of only large, established publishers with fat wallets not so long ago. Content management, feed generation, subscriber management, […]
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The Internet, Warts and All
The Internet, Warts and All: Free Speech, Privacy and Truth by Paul Bernal is not a law book; it is a book about seeking to understand an environment – the internet – in which the law operates. It is a book about law, but “It is also … about technology, about politics, about psychology, about […]
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Transforming access to justice
HM Courts and Tribunals Service held a public event on 6 November, inviting those who represent public court users to see first-hand the progress made over the last year with the court reform program. One such representative was Roger Smith who has reported back, generally positively, on his Law, Technology & Acees to Justice blog. […]
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CPD and continuing competence for 2018 – do it online now!
We can (again) help you complete your continuing competence requirements this year. Our Internet for Lawyers CPD 2018 competence service guides you, via online articles and exercises, through the legal resources and tools available, helps you understand the internet and the legal issues it raises and assists you in the practical application of internet services […]
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Open data: free to use and republish
In the last issue we looked at the concept of open law; we should probably now take a step back and consider what is meant by open data. Open data is the idea that some data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or […]
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