Internet Newsletter for Lawyers
July/August 2006, by Delia Venables

Providing information on a website has some fairly obvious advantages over printed leaflets. The first is that it widens the potential readership. A popular leaflet printed by the law centre might be read by a total of ten thousand people or so. The same information provided on a website has the capacity to reach ten times that number (or even more)!

Providing information on a website is cheap. Even taking into account the time, hosting fees, domain names etc., the cost of producing a page on a website is negligible when compared with even a modest print run of printed leaflets. This cost advantage is underlined when you consider that a webpage can be easily updated to reflect changes in the law, where a printed leaflet would require a costly reprint.

Our main website

Private practice law firms walk a tight-wire with their websites. The aim is (often) to provide just enough information to attract people to the website, but not enough to render a visit to the firm superfluous. As a charitable body, we are mercifully free of such constraints and we are quite happy to provide as much information as we can usefully pass on to people. This approach has made the website a popular destination with over 28,000 unique visitors in the last month alone!

Other domains and websites

First, we reckoned that we were dealing with two very distinct legal “markets”. The information needs of the parent of a child with special educational needs were quite different to the target consumer or tenant profile of the main law centre website. Second, from an operational point of view, responsibility for the content of the ELU website was to be held by me, whereas the Principal Solicitor was to retain responsibility for the main website. Too many authors and editors spoil the website broth!

Finally, it was a condition of our funding that we set up a website for education law matters, and a page or set of pages hosted on another website didn’t seem quite enough.

So, a new domain was purchased, www.edlaw.org.uk, and a website launched. Now in its third incarnation, it continues to be the leading website in the (admittedly very small) field of education law in Scotland and follows the main site’s commitment to providing useful content. It is widely used by both parents and teachers.

We opted for “edlaw” as opposed to “educationlaw” on the grounds that we wanted something short and easy to remember. In retrospect, given the number of times I have to spell the URL, I am not sure that this was a good idea!

To coincide with the coming into force (in November 2005) of the Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Act 2004, we launched a brand new website which was to be a detailed guide to this new law. Adopting a school room look to the website design (clichéd, I know) we drafted a comprehensive yet comprehensible text which explained all aspects of the new law and how it was likely to work in practice. This was then split into manageable chunks and entered into a series of linked pages to form an electronic guide. Added to this were links to the legislation, relevant events, downloads, related legal topics etc. Having learned our lesson about using abbreviations and in an attempt to maximise our search engine visibility, we opted for www.additionalsupportneeds.org.uk as the domain name.

The site is aimed at senior pupils, parents and educationalists. Providing this level of detail online has been a real bonus in terms of our workload as well. The Education Law Unit operates an Education Law Helpline and many of the questions we receive are about additional support needs. Rather than taking a caller through the whole detailed procedure for referring a matter to an independent adjudicator, for example, if the caller has Internet access we can now simply refer them to the web page and ask them to call back if they have any problems.

We have recently fulfilled another funding condition by creating a website on education law matters for pupils who speak Gaelic. The domain name had also to be in Gaelic, so www.lagh-sgoile.org.uk was chosen – or “school law” in the English translation. This highlights another benefit of our websites – the ability to provide legal information in different community languages simply and cheaply.

Last, but by no means least, is our Unfair UK Bank Charges website, www.bankcharges.info which has been a runaway success. Stemming from our own experiences of having been charged with hefty bank charges for minor fiscal misdemeanours, we decided that this was an area of law which was not well known to people, but could potentially be of use to almost everybody – ideal law centre territory!

The site sets out, in a few short simple steps, how to reclaim charges imposed from your bank or building society. It includes all of the information you need, whether you live in Scotland, England, Wales or Northern Ireland and has standard letters to download and send. The system works and from the 105 e-mails thanking us for our assistance we know that we have helped in the recovery of £36,951. We also know that many others have downloaded the letters (approx. 3,000 per month at present) and if even some of these are successful, we estimate that the site has been instrumental in the recovery of well over £250,000 in unlawfully imposed charges by banks, building societies and credit card companies.

The site has also been the subject of a great deal of media attention which has helped us to reach even more people. Would the site have been so popular if it was just www.govanlc.com/bankchargespages.html? I doubt it.

Iain Nisbet is a partner at the Govan Law Centre and Head of its Education Law Unit (ELU). He designed the three ELU websites himself and also runs the Scots Law portal absolvitor.com. email iain@wordjam.org.

Note from Delia: Govan Law Centre uses a Creative Commons licence - see the article by Jonathan Mitchell Creative Commons for more on this.