Bright New Ideas for Websites
Ongoing series put together by Delia Venables
Conveyancing Online Filechaser
by Tom Fitzpatrick, Fitzpatricks
We are a small firm in West Sussex with ideas definitely above the way big firms expect little firms to behave. Our website is at http://www.fitzpatricks-law.co.uk.
We have used Solicitec case management (called Solcase) for several years. After a lot of difficulty programming it to work in the way we wanted, we were keen to take Solcase Online as soon as it was available. We then spent a huge amount of time working with Solicitec to get Online right, because of all the confidentiality issues involved and because we have linked sales and purchases for the same clients.
As we have programmed it, Solcase Online software takes the results of our case management system and loads up the client reports onto the website. The client can then view the state of the matter from any computer with an internet connection and the relevant password - day or night, from anywhere in the world.
We are now heavily involved in marketing - there is no point in having a wonderful new system that no one else has if nobody knows that it is there!
With the client's permission, estate agents can also access the system to monitor progress, and provide an efficient service to their clientele. From our point of view, we save time in not having to chase around so much in response to client queries and of course the same reports are also available to our staff in-house, making it a simple matter to answer phone requests for information where the client is not using the online access.
The advantage small firms have over large firms in developing software is that small firms and sole practitioners can act without a committee breathing down their neck and can take risks with development and marketing time. They are also more likely to spend evenings and weekends working on the software!
If anyone is planning to develop case management and particularly if they want to put the results online, they should double their budgets for both time and money and then add some more, because they have to do their own individual programming from flowcharting onwards (all firms think their ways are best!).
Online is already very much liked by clients and will become a good selling point as more people become aware of what it offers.
Tom Fitzpatrick, fitz@fitzpatricks-law.co.uk
Online Conveyancing Quotes
by Martin Malone, Canter Levin & Berg
I am a partner in Canter Levin & Berg, a medium-sized general practice based in Liverpool. We set up our first site in 1998, and have been constantly redesigning it since then, and adding new features (http://www.canter-law.co.uk).
Early this year, we decided that a fundamental revision of the firm's main site was required. Central to the revisions was the proposed introduction of an online conveyancing quotation service, which would provide accurate prices to include not only costs but correctly quoted disbursements. The challenge turned out to be much greater than initially envisaged!
I contacted John Guest (Justlaw, http://www.justlaw.org.uk) who was advertising a conveyancing costs calculator. After a meeting with John and the head of the conveyancing department, we decided to run with John's service but in order to get what we needed, his database service needed to be adapted. Our object was to include all disbursements including local authority search fees throughout England & Wales. I began by working with the idea of clickable image maps broken down into regions and then areas but it soon became clear that the boundaries for the authorities themselves were just too tricky to render and to be accurately identified by users. There are currently 375 local authorities in England & Wales, many of which have split prices by location (e.g. inside or outside the boundaries of a National Park).
My next attempt was to build in a matching service based on postcodes but this had two drawbacks. First, the initial parts of postcodes (e.g. CH1 or CH43) can straddle local authority boundaries so a selection process by this method was not reliable. Second, it was of course by no means certain that enquirers would know the correct postcode.
In the end, I decided that the only practical way to proceed was to include a list for selection of the correct authority by enquirers who could then select the appropriate fee for insertion in the calculation. A member of staff was instructed to contact all the local authorities in order to produce a list of up to date search fees and to ensure that the list is kept up to date for corresponding maintenance of the database. For ease of access, I decided on pop-up windows on a county by county format accessible by a simple javascript code. Since not all users have javascript installed or enabled, I have doubled up by including a full list on a separate page with quick reference to county lists by hyperlinks within the page.
The service finally went online on 17th September. It still needs some tweaking and the next projects are the inclusion of localised (as opposed to local) searches such as coal mining and Cheshire brine searches. At the moment, these are covered by terms of use which need to be accepted before accessing the service.
Why bother with accurate disbursements within the quotation? I firmly believe that as with other legal services, wherever possible, potential clients should know what their charges are going to be down to the last penny. There really should be no reason why this should not extend to conveyancing quotations. Incorporation of local searches is significant because the variation can be significant. The current lowest charge is £26 for North Cornwall (standard) and the highest £200 (Daventry). As a result, the potential overall quote variation for a standard residential purchase could be as much as just under 10% for a £100,000 property and as much as 28% for a £50,000 purchase. If online services are to retain the confidence of enquirers then such potential anomalies should be eliminated.
As far as I am aware, our service is currently the only one of its type which provides accurate local search fees throughout England & Wales. Others include the facility to select from a limited number of local searches for authorities in the vicinity of the practice or simply include an average price of, say, £100 or £150.
What next? I will see how the system works in practice and I will shortly be discussing with John Guest the possibility of licensing the service for use on other firms' websites.
Martin Malone, martinmalone@canter-law.demon.co.uk
Credit Control in Scotland - and the importance of marketing a site
by Stephen Cowan, of Yuill & Kyle
The relaunch of the Yuill & Kyle debt recovery website at http://www.debtscotland.com provides the user with the opportunity of viewing various credit control pointers answering many basic credit control questions. These can be found in the "credit control" section.
In addition users wishing to register on the site are given the opportunity of having access to the library. This contains a plethora of material on both credit control and legal aspects of debt recovery ranging from retention of title, insolvency as well as an in depth review of Scottish legal recovery processes.
The "Downloads" section allows registered users access to no fewer than seventeen different types of credit self-assembly documents amongst which are "reminder" and "demand" letters. The latter have a variable interest calculator with the option of multiple invoicing.
All of these facilities are provided free of charge. In addition site visitors can instruct Yuill & Kyle to undertake a gamut of credit control functions including letters before action, court action or fast track recoveries. These items will have to be paid for.
The site has taken almost eighteen months to develop. We intend to approach lawyers from other jurisdictions to add articles of interest reflecting the dynamics of credit control law in their own countries, thus developing a valuable international credit control resource.
The motivation for the site's development is twofold. Firstly to ensure Yuill & Kyle are seen to be leaders in credit control law and secondly as a means of securing additional business for the firm.
And it is the latter which I consider many lawyers have failed to address. I have examined many sites on the net and have been amazed at the amount of information, help and advice they contain. Without question a great deal of effort has gone into their construction and maintenance.
But what is the purpose of these sites? If the intention is to generate new business then an exemplary presence on the web may well be insufficient - the sites will have to be marketed. In my experience marketing the site will take certainly as much expertise, and possibly as much time, as the site's development. There is absolutely no point in having a site, the intention of which is to generate new business, unless people are aware of its existence.
What I am advocating is that sufficient thought be given to the marketing objectives at the early design stage of the site's development. If this is neglected it may be a fantastic site but with few people being aware of its existence. A golden opportunity will have been wasted.
Stephen Cowan, scowan@yuill-kyle.co.uk
A Multilingual Website
by Kevin Crombie, Scottish Law Online
As more and more users around the world join the internet, companies and organisations with websites are becoming aware of the need to cater for a wider audience.
Everyday, in my travels through the web, and in considering new facilities for my website at http://www.scottishlaw.org.uk, I find useful sites and resources. It is extremely rare though to find a site as useful as T-Mail (http://www.t-mail.com) which is a site containing tools for online language translation. One of the services it offers, T-Sail, translates webpages into several different languages, translating the page as it is requested. If you go off the site, it seems to keep translating which is good for foreign language users. What really makes the site stand out though is the fact that it is FREE!
Upon discovering this I immediately took full advantage of the service and made Scottish Law Online available in seven extra languages: Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. I simply went to the T-Mail site, entered my site as the page I wished to translate and then chose the language. This produced a web page in the correct language so I copied the link, pasted it onto the front page and repeated this for each language. According to T-Mail, support for Arabic, Hindi, Hebrew and Korean is presently being developed and when it is I will also add these.
The downside is that T-Sail is still a computer program. It will not translate words inside images nor information such as live news feeds taken from another site by way of adding JavaScript code to the page. More importantly, it will not translate words that it doesn't know (e.g. - conveyancing) and it will translate words that it does (e.g. - the company "Virgin" becomes "Jungfrau" in German). Check whether your firm's name will be affected!
There are people of many races living in Britain and they should all be able to "access" justice. Aside from this, users worldwide access UK sites daily looking for information. My own site received visits from over 60 countries last month and this will hopefully increase.
Whether you are a small firm catering for an ethnically diverse community or a large firm hoping to attract business worldwide you should consider using this or a similar service to attract custom.
Kevin Crombie, kfc@totalise.co.uk
Kevin is a trainee at McGrigor Donald
Growonline.ie
by Shaun O'Shea, Beauchamps
Beauchamps Solicitors, based in Dublin, already have a "normal" site at http://www.beauchamps.ie, but now also have a site devoted to assisting Irish businesses grow online at http://www.growonline.ie. This is the first site of its type set up by an Irish law firm.
In the aftermath of the dotcom boom and bust there is a new sense of reality to the commercial opportunities afforded by the Internet. Gone are the rushed business plans and hysteria, in their place business people are starting to approach e-commerce ventures with traditional business frameworks and mentality. What has been learnt is that the Internet still offers huge potential to businesses which plan properly.
A recent survey carried out in the UK by Landwell and PricewaterhouseCoopers, finds that many online business ventures are leaving themselves open to risks from failing to consider the legal issues involved in trading online. The survey found that 40% of respondents in the UK market failed to limit their own liability. In the case of international suppliers, 25% did not even know what steps should been taken to limit liability.
One fifth of the e-commerce ventures surveyed had taken no advice on the enforceability of their online contracts and more than a third failed to consider the liabilities arising from linking with other websites and allowing users to post comments on their sites.
Disputes are increasingly making headlines and business need to pay attention to the rapidly changing regulatory and legal environment. In recent months, there have been a number of significant pieces of legislation which impact on how businesses are expected to trade online, yet awareness is still low.
The site provides assistance to existing businesses who wish to expand online, including information on domain name registration, cybersquatting, hosting agreements, intellectual property issues and online contracts. The site also provides useful information for start-up ventures, including articles on incorporation, distribution and agency agreements, supply and customer agreements, property considerations and employment issues.
Shaun O'Shea, s.o'shea@beauchamps.ie
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