Internet Newsletter for Lawyers |
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Who wants to read a council legal department's business plan on the web? Not many people, I imagine, other than a lawyer from another council looking for ideas to poach. A presence on the web is a "must have" these days, so that fear of getting left behind, and the government's e-targets for councils, are resulting in the uploading of a vast amount of material, some of it interesting, much of it not.
I ought to come clean at this point, and say that as of yet, there is no "legal" content on South Hams District Council's website (www.south-hams-dc.gov.uk). That is not because we are technophobes, but because we want to get our internet presence right first time, while being aware that it is only one part of the Council's e-strategy.
When faced with the government's target of having all services deliverable electronically by 2005, it is easy to forget that computers have not just arrived overnight. I reckon my first PC landed on my desk eight years ago, and I am now on my third (thanks to our IT section's rolling replacement policy, rather than any careless handling of cups of coffee on my part). Onto it went all our precedents and our home-made professional tools, which we call simply "Archives" (previous bits of advice which might be useful again some day) and "Specimens" (or "here's one I did earlier" in the best tradition of Blue Peter). And with it came that chore of trying to keep it all up to date and delete the stuff that was no longer correct.
Then came the e-mail and electronic diaries. I have described it as like being given a car and no driving lessons. When I see senior officers trying to type e-mails with two fingers, I feel eternally grateful that I was given a typewriter as a child (don't ask why) and was reasonably good at using it. I do wonder, though, why professionals who lack this ability fail to realise they can dictate e-mails in the same way as they do letters.
I am still in awe of the amount of material that there is on the web, for free, and how relatively easy it is to find it. I love Findlaw (lawcrawler.findlaw.com) although I find you need to stick "uk" in the search field if you don't want to know about taxi licensing in Wisconsin. Never under-estimate the usefulness of the sites of the national dailies and the BBC, which make it so much easier to respond to a resident who writes "You will be aware of the recent case involving a council in the Midlands and a goat.." If I was previously unaware, that can soon be rectified.
info4local.gov.uk at www.info4local.gov.uk (read it out loud) is a portal for local authorities to find relevant information on the web sites of central government departments and agencies. It is run by a group of 6 departments including the Department of Education and Skills, Department of Health, Home Office, Department for Transport, Department for Work and Pensions and Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. It includes full reports from all government related bodies (many in pdf), new press releases, and extended links to related bodies. You can sign up for a free email alert to receive notification of the latest information from government departments and agencies relating to local government.
The discussions on the Local Government Chronicle's site www.lgcnet.com/pages/discuss/discuss.asp can be useful although this is more for general interest than in a genuine attempt to try to find a specific answer to a question. The Local Government Ombudsman's site contains a useful digest of cases (www.lgo.org.uk), although it would be more useful with a proper index (isn't that so often the case). And the last couple of months have seen us bombarded with queries about the new Model Codes of Conduct for local authority members, the answers to some of which are on www.local-regions.odpm.gov.uk/index.htm.
Not being complete cheapskates, we have also subscribed to Lawtel at www.lawtel.co.uk, whose material can be accessed by everyone in the organisation, who can therefore receive their own daily update on subjects of their choice. Judging by the takeup, I have no fear that lawyers will be driven out of business by clients conducting their own research. We do, however, encourage them to use the facility, and some of them have begun to take an interest.
I also encourage client departments to see what other councils do, in a situation where legally there is more than one right answer. Notwithstanding my flippant opening remarks about cribbing each other's business plans, there is scope for best practice becoming infectious in this way.
Frankly I don't see much point in putting your business plan on the council's website, although other policy documents would be at home there. I also have my doubts about council sites which do a who's who of their legal team, such as "Joe Bloggs was admitted in 1985 and is an expert on the Land Drainage Act", when they cannot give advice to the general public anyway.
So what am I going to do? The starting point is who is the website aimed at (and it must be predominantly the public) and what do they want from us. We can't give them free legal advice, but they still find things to write, ring up and call in about. "Is there a byelaw against playing rounders in Dartmouth?" "Can you tell me who owns a bit of land?" Only if it's ours - if not try the Land Registry. "I want to buy an ex-Council house - what are the restrictions, and what do I need to do to show that I comply?" Some houses in rural areas are restricted to people who have lived or worked in the area for three years. "Can you give us free legal advice?" No, but try www.justask.org.uk.
Although Frequently Annoying (sorry, Asked) Questions can be an over-used device, we certainly encounter questions which are frequently asked (and frequently annoying), so my first prize would go to Richmond upon Thames (www.richmond.gov.uk) which uses this format to good effect. Apologies to anyone else with a good site that I haven't stumbled across yet. I intend mine to follow loosely the Richmond idea, in another example of best practice spreading.
Are our colleagues' internet-related problems a source of legal work? We aim to go for prevention rather than cure, and our Chief of Legal and Property Services is our e-envoy and guides our e-government strategy group. The copyright-type issues about which I have been consulted have been other people trying to pinch our material rather than the other way around. Having said that, our site is not yet very interactive, and the more the public come to rely on it, the more we will be required to advise on the precautions needed to guard against spiralling liability. In time, people will be using the internet to vote or reply to formal notices. What if the system goes down or the message doesn't get through?
In the legal section, our biggest interfaces will be with our internal clients, and a taste of things to come is provided by our recent connection to the MVM Planner 20/20 system used by our development control section. Much work has been done to input data going back many years, so that we can now access it from our PCs without calling up bulky paper files. In matters like planning enforcement, the two departments will soon be integrated via the one system.
Our local land charges search service has been online since last June and has the capability to receive and issue searches electronically via the NLIS hub. So far they have been accepting searches electronically but returning them via the DX in paper form. The next step will be to return them electronically. In time, links like the one between the legal and development control sections will enable the back-office part of the process to be paperless as well.
A glance at our e-government strategy (at www.south-hams-dc.gov.uk/Assets/shamieg.pdf) will show that prime position in the race for compliance with the government's targets is held by property-based systems. The strategy ends up (not surprisingly) with the target of a fully transactional website by 2005, but whether all the projects listed come to fruition will undoubtedly depend on availability of funds. E-government represents an enormous collection of projects for a small authority, with heavy demands on financial and personnel resources.
So we are not among the trailblazers, but we are not lagging behind either. I like to think that rather than piling everything we can think of onto our website, we are giving more thought to the way we do things, and how that can be enhanced by the technology available.
Ross Hussey is Principal Solicitor at South Hams District Council, where he has worked since 1991. Admitted in 1986, he has previously worked at the London Borough of Merton and in the private sector. Apart from playing with his computer, he tends to concentrate on planning, property and environmental health work.
Email Ross.Hussey@south-hams-dc.gov.uk.
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