Internet Newsletter for Lawyers
May/June 2005, by Delia Venables

The Weekly Alerter is an email that is published every Tuesday to lawyers in private practice and industry containing headline links to legal articles and reviews that have been published online in the previous week.

Linex Legal was set up towards the end of 2002 with the primary intention of monitoring a dozen or so online legal sources and sending out a summary newsletter every week to a handful of interested lawyers. The service has since grown steadily and now monitors over 500 legal sources, providing the information to over 30,000 lawyers.

In recent months, at the request of its international clients, Linex has also begun to roll out the service to other jurisdictions including the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It also plans to roll out the service to other European jurisdictions later this year.

Linex Legal has an ambitious target of becoming both the leading distributor and also the leading source of legal information in the UK and internationally. It has invested heavily in its technology, which it sees as key to achieving these aims. It is also developing very close relationships with law firms and legal publishers in many jurisdictions to ensure the continued improvement of its service. Parallel to this, Linex Legal is customising its technology to become a standalone application for law firms for handling their own internal content management requirements.

The benefits of Linex Legal are such that it has appeal to all varieties of legal bodies – from the largest of the city law firms, to in-house legal departments, local councils, and even to the one partner provincial law firm. The only difference is that in the larger organisations with their own professional support lawyers (PSL's), it is often the PSL's who are the principal users, who further filter the information before passing it on to the relevant fee earners. Whereas in the medium to smaller organisations without their own dedicated support, it is the lawyers themselves who are directly accessing legal updates from within Linex.

Information Providers

In recent years, many law firms have come to realise the necessity of actively marketing their services, rather than sitting back and expecting their reputations to do all the work. That is why they are now regularly producing high quality legal updates, the principal purpose of which is to say "Hey, look at us. We know what we are talking about". Having produced the high quality material, they want it to be circulated as widely as possible.

Barrister chambers are also slowly coming round to realising the importance of marketing themselves. This is in part a result of recent changes in the Bar Council's rules allowing barristers to seek instructions from organisations that have the necessary skills and experience to instruct the bar direct. Linex Legal thus anticipates a high growth in legal articles and updates being published online by barrister chambers in the months to come, and which in turn will be accessible via Linex.

Keeping up to date

In recent years, there has been only one sure way for lawyers to keep themselves regularly informed of legal updates being published by the many online legal publishers. This involved registering with each and every organisation to receive email updates, and then trawling through those emails for information of interest. If they were diligent, they would also visit the websites of those organisations that don't provide an email updating service. What has become clear is that a substantial amount of time is required to sieve through all the information available online in order to identify interesting and relevant legal updates and reviews that are useful and sometimes necessary for legal practice.

Finding a solution to the problems of information overload facing lawyers has been the main focus of Linex Legal over the last year. The question was how to increase the choice of relevant and high quality information available to lawyers, but also to cut out the "noise" so that lawyers can quickly identify the information that is of relevance to them.

Linex Legal has resolved this by firstly providing lawyers with a single access point to legal updates published by all the main legal content sources and secondly by categorising each update to ensure that lawyers receive only information that matches their individually customised profiles. Rather than receiving 100's of emails every week from 100's of different sources, lawyers can now receive one email that contains links to only the content they are interested in.

Matthew Dickinson trained at Manches. He moved to Hobson Audley (now known as Faegre & Benson LLP following a merger) in 2001 where he practised as a corporate finance lawyer for 3 years. He then brought together people with experience in content management software, news distribution and legal know-how and set up Linex Legal, www.linexlegal.com. A free trial is available.
Email mjd@linexlegal.com.

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