Internet Newsletter for Lawyers |
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I am always interested in companies who saw the importance of the internet for lawyers early and who have persevered with their vision. Here, I give a profile of Lawyers Online, www.lawyersonline.co.uk, the first specialist ISP for lawyers. They have been one of the well known "names" in the UK legal Internet since (it seems) the very beginning, but they have rarely been much in the public eye. I took advantage of a recent visit to Hereford, where they have their headquarters, to visit the company and to meet Managing Director Alan Tomlinson.
Lawyers Online started in 1998 as a byproduct of a solicitor, Rosie Houghton, carrying out group litigation involving around 130 firms and realising that the internet - and email in particular - offered a simpler and cheaper alternative to the massive amount of photocopying and managing of documents sent and faxed between them which was necessary to run cases of this kind. At that time, however, only 3 of the firms had an email address and a major effort was required to get the firms into the position where the emailing of documents - and the understanding of the security implications involved - was a realistic proposition.
Whilst it would have been possible to use a normal business-oriented Internet Service provider for this, it was considered at the time that the security which could be provided by an in-house and lawyers-only operation would be preferable to reliance on an outside body which might have less experience of the absolute confidentiality required in a legal environment and possibly less inclination to provide advice and support in the use of associated technologies within the legal office.
Whilst a high level of security is still a selling point of Lawyers Online, the real advantage has subtly shifted to the level of personal service which can be provided to small firms without IT departments or massive IT experience by a lawyers-only team.
Rosie Houghton herself is now not involved in the day to day running of the company but it still feels more like an in-house legal department than a large technical company. Apart from Alan Tomlinson, the team consists of a small systems support team who design, build and manage their own web mail and secure application servers and support the users. The servers are hosted at a number of commercial hosting facilities in the Midlands and South East but the flexibility is retained by Lawyers Online to expand or move to additional providers if the need arises. Perhaps most revolutionary of all, the Lawyers Online support lines are answered by real people to whom the user has probably spoken before, and these real people have constant access to the servers and can make any changes needed whilst the user is actually on the phone.
Whilst a number of ISP's for Lawyers were started at various times (including Connecting Legal from Waterlow, Access2Law from Go Interactive and LegalISP from Statplus) I think that Lawyers Online is the only one left seriously providing ISP services to lawyers. They have around 1,500 subscribers using either broadband, email or hosting services, or often all three. Most of these are solicitors firms although a few are local law societies, barristers chambers and legal bodies of other kinds.
They are particularly strong with the smaller firms, without IT departments; larger firms may feel able to work with the normal business providers but the smaller ones need a greater level of help and support. The firms either contact Lawyers Online directly to arrange the email and web hosting facilities required or use their own local IT company (the responsibility for IT in the firm is often outsourced) to manage the process for them. Apparently, the average annual invoice value for email and hosting services is around £150, which sounds very modest to me.
Although they will provide web design services and consultancy, if asked, they feel that designing websites has now become a different specialism and they do not get involved in this a great deal, whereas they are heavily involved in back-end programming of web based services. Incidentally, their own website offers one unusual feature - a series of training pages on email, web hosting and security products which can be studied by lawyers for training purposes and for which CPD can be gained.
New services now being made available include virus and spam filtering of email, provided in a way particularly appropriate to legal firms who cannot afford to lose important emails and who equally cannot afford any loss in confidentiality. Interest in their security audit and penetration testing has risen sharply and the technical team are also working on the ability to provide "Voice over IP" (VoIP) solutions, as the "convergence" between data and voice continues unabated.
email alan@lawyersonline.co.uk.
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