Year: 2018
Online justice news
The new HMCTS divorce online service has moved out of Beta and is now online at www.gov.uk/apply-for-divorce. It offers prompts and guidance to assist people in completing their application. The whole process can be completed online, including payment and uploading supporting evidence. The service has already contributed to a 95 per cent drop in the […]
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The Law Society Guide to Good Practice
The “fully updated” second print edition of The Law Society Guide to Good Practice includes 100 current Law Society practice notes, plus details of useful contacts and further resources, an index and tables of citations. It is 972 pp, weighs 1.5 kg, occupies 4.3 cm of shelf space and costs £60. All 119 current Law […]
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Automated Intelligence – a strategy that delivers tangible business benefits today
A constant stream of technological innovations has now become the norm, with each new technology promising to be a game-changer for business in the future. Artificial intelligence (AI) immediately comes to mind as the latest ‘silver bullet’. In fact, the widespread view is that AI is going to take the legal sector by storm – […]
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7 steps to mitigating risk and reducing your law firm’s professional indemnity premium
If you ask an insurer what the three biggest risks are when providing cover to a law firm they will likely respond with ‘conveyancing, conveyancing and conveyancing’. An ever-increasing market pressure on price and a push towards high-volume, low-margin workloads in an extremely competitive market are doing nothing to reduce a law firm’s exposure to […]
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CRM: the business case for automation
CRM stands for Contact/Customer/Client Relationship Management, where “contacts” include clients, introducers, business partners and prospects, so you want to capture and use information on all of these; but much is missed, so can never be acted upon. CRM is high on the agenda again, prompted by increasing recognition of the value of informed relationships to […]
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Link building best practices and strategies
With Douglas Millar “Growing the link profile of a website is critical to gaining traction, attention, and traffic from the [search] engines. As an SEO, link building is among the top tasks required for search ranking and traffic success.” Moz The importance of link building Approaching its 20th birthday later this year, Google is still […]
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Facebook as a marketing platform for lawyers
Facebook is the grandaddy of social media. Founded in 2004, it is by no means the oldest service, but by a huge margin it is the largest, boasting in excess of two billion users worldwide. Although it is used primarily for personal networking purposes, documenting the lives and thoughts of its users to help them […]
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Where next for alternative legal services providers?
There have been two distinct waves of foundings of alternative legal services providers (ALSPs): one from 1999 to 2007, including outsourcing companies such as Integreon, Axiom, Relativity, Consilio, Exigent, Pangea3 and Lawyers On Demand; and then another from 2010 to 2015, including the new wave of tech companies such as Neota Logic, Ravel Law, ROSS […]
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Direct access – how is it going?
Under the Bar Council scheme launched in 2004, members of the public and businesses may now instruct barristers directly and without the intervention of a solicitor. There has been a lot of talk and discussion on this new “freedom” since then, along the lines of the following questions: Will it benefit members of the public? […]
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Do I still need to use the www in URLs?
The answer to this question is, of course, “It depends.” It depends on the context. First, let’s get some terminology out of the way. We are all familiar with a domain name, like example.com. The bit in front of a domain name, www or whatever, is a subdomain. The domain name without any prefix is […]
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Major cost savings through more intelligent legal research
Legal research is regarded as one of the necessary expenses of the legal profession. It’s a task that needs to be done to ensure that arguments are robust, and to build the most comprehensive case possible, but it is a time-consuming task. This is why legal research is often delegated to trainees and newly qualified […]
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Crosselerator™ – solving the cross-referral problem
This article is about a new product created by my firm called Crosselerator™ which I immodestly believe is likely to be one of the most profitable pieces of software for users that they’ll ever own. It was producing enquiries for us almost as soon as we started using it, and as I write this (Jan […]
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