ISSUE No.112 - 03.07.2002 Eversheds spin off online business - Ringtail announces portal edition - New email guide for small firms - Online resource for Scottish criminal lawyers - Irish employment decisions available - Recognition for ADR Chambers - Web videoconference service goes live in Singapore - Roll on sticky Friday - Next issue: 17.07.2002

EVERSHEDS SPIN OFF ONLINE COMMERCIAL DEBT RECOVERY BUSINESS
As part of its strategic business review Eversheds has transferred its Nottingham based online commercial debt recovery business to Legal Recoveries & Collections Ltd (LR&C). Eversheds will however continue its consumer debt recovery services for financial institutions out of its Leeds and Cardiff offices.

LR&C is a new company formed by the current management team at Eversheds. The directors are Andrew Newsome (systems development manager), Peter Squires, Rachel Gordon, Claire Clark (debt recovery account managers), and Maxine Buttery (business development manager). Eversheds partner Chris Radford has transferred to the firm's insolvency practice and will continue to be based in Eversheds' Nottingham office. The directors of LR&C have been an integral part of the Eversheds team which developed the online debt recovery service. Legal Recoveries & Collections will continue to offer the same level of service, providing bespoke letter and telephone collections and legal techniques to improve its clients' cash flow and reduce debtor days.

RINGTAIL ANNOUNCES PORTAL EDITION
Ringtail Solutions has announced the release of Version 6 of Ringtail CaseBook, its browser-based litigation support and knowledge management application. Key features of the new release include: improved transcript management, an advanced search facility that support fuzzy logic and the CasePortal - a the new, top level window into the application. All top level 'user and 'case' maintenance, such as security, user or case creation, editing and deletion, is managed at the CasePortal. There are also a number of collaborative facilities that are consolidated at this 'Portal level', such as a generic calendar that gives a view of all events and tasks related to any, one or all cases that the user is working on. www.ringtailsolutions.com

NEW GUIDE TO EMAIL & INTERNET ACCESS SOLUTIONS FOR SMALLER UK LAW FIRMS
Although Enron is just the latest high profile case to spotlight the legal issues surrounding the use of email, for many solicitors a far more pressing problem is actually ensuring that their own practices select and install the right systems to support their use of email and the internet. To address this problem, the legal management consultancy Practical Solutions has just published a comprehensive new guide - 'Email & Internet Access Solutions for Smaller Firms' - which not only looks at all the issues but also contains some useful checklists and charts to help simplify the selection process.

Along with a clear explanation of all the technology and terminology involved - everything from aliases to worms, by way of bandwidth and spam - the guide looks at the growing number of commercial reasons - including recent developments in the residential conveyancing market and the Legal Services Commission's e-commerce initiatives - why law firms should now view email and internet access as a core practice technology. The guide then goes into considerable detail explaining the various options available, ranging dial-up modem links through to total solutions running across practice-wide networks, such as Microsoft Exchange, before providing checklists highlighting the different permutations (including number of users, volume of email traffic and size of budget) that will suit different types of firm.

Existing users of email will also find this guide useful, both as a starting point for upgrading from basic systems and as a source of complementary advice and information, including the golden rules to follow when using email to help promote your practice and the template for a practice email and internet usage policy.

Commenting on the need for such a guide, Dominic Watson of Practical Solutions said: "Selecting computer systems can be extremely difficult at the best of times, but for small law firms with limited resources and internal IT expertise, selecting an email/internet access solution can be a particularly difficult, painful and sometimes haphazard process. For small firms, time is at a premium and it is impossible to explore and understand all of the options open to them. It would be good to get independent advice, but the cost of a specialist IT consultant who understands legal specific requirements can sometime be prohibitive. This guide aims to demystify the jargon and provide a simple method of assessing a firm's requirements and to source an appropriate solution."

'Email & Internet Access Solutions for Smaller Firms' is written for firms with between 1 and 50 users. Copies of the guide cost £25 (including p&p) and can be ordered via the Practical Solutions web site at www.inpractice.co.uk or by calling Kayleigh O'Neill on 0161 929 8355.

ONLINE SERVICE FOR SCOTS CRIMINAL LAWYERS
Westlaw UK Scots Crime, a new dedicated online service for Scots criminal lawyers has gone live. The service, launched by the Scottish law publisher W Green, builds on the successful launch last year of Westlaw UK Scots Law. Westlaw UK Scots Crime is intended to become the most comprehensive online source of specialist information on Scottish criminal law and an essential research tool for Scottish criminal practitioners.

It features over 1000 legislative documents including over 500 Acts applicable in Scotland originating from both Westminster and Holyrood, together with over 10,000 case related documents including over 5500 full text Scots Law Times Reports from 1930 to present day. It also brings together online the profession's two most trusted works - Renton & Brown's Criminal Procedure 6th Edition and Renton & Brown's Criminal Procedure Legislation - as well as all criminal legislation and case law as applicable in Scotland. Westlaw UK Scots Crime is available as a stand-alone service or as an optional add-on module to Westlaw UK Scots Law. www.wgreen.co.uk/wluk/scc/about.asp

IRISH INDUSTRIAL TRIBUNALS NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE
ILegal-Island, the Irish legal internet portal, is now hosting the decision of the Northern Ireland Industrial Tribunal (the equivalent of English employment tribunals). This is the first time that such decisions have gone online and while at present only available in a table format, they will soon be incorporated within a searchable database. The decisions can be found at: www.legal-island.com/ITdecisions.htm

RECOGNITION FOR ADR CHAMBERS
Congratulations to ADR Chambers which secured third place in the Chambers of the Year category at last week's The Lawyer 2002 Awards. The awards citation described ADR as "the little known chambers which stormed onto the scene last year. In a climate of growing dependence on arbitration no other set can boast the volume of talent from barristers through to retired Law Lords". One of the elements ADR Chambers has used to establish its presence is its interactive web site at www.adrchambers.co.uk The site was planned and developed by Clerksroom and uses Citrix to provide access to case management functionality based on Meridian Law and Microsoft Office software.

WEB BASED VIDEOCONFERENCE SERVICE GOES ONLINE IN SINGAPORE
Last week saw Singapore's Chief Justice Yong Pung How and Attorney-General Chan Sek Keong officially launch the new JusticeOnLine service. JusticeOnLine is a web based videoconferencing system that enables lawyers to conduct multi-party court hearings from the convenience of their offices, thereby allowing them to save travelling and court waiting time and convert the time saved into productive, billable time. According to official estimates "by using the Justice Online system for administrative non-contentious hearings in the Civil Registry (Subordinate Courts) alone the legal industry will save more than $20 million in billable hours in one year."

Eighteen law firms as well as State Counsel and Deputy Public Prosecutors from the Attorney-General's Chambers have been using the system for a wide range of virtual hearings at the Subordinate Courts since January this year as part of a pilot project. The Supreme Court has also implemented this videoconferencing system for pre-trial conferences (set down) and pre-trial conferences (admiralty) since March. The positive response to the system from participants has led to an expansion of its scope to cover pre-trial conferences in the Family and Criminal Courts, taxation and probate hearings, adoption proceedings and chamber hearings before the Duty Registrar.

JusticeOnLine stations have recently been installed in the prisons to enable prison inmates to be interviewed by officers from the Attorney-General's Chambers without having to be transported from one physical location to another. Very soon, the service will also be available for settlement conferences and Registrar's Appeals at the Subordinate Courts. Along with multi-party videoconferencing, the system also supports online booking, notification, 'queueing' and billing.

The system was developed by International Video Conference Center (IVCC) and Bizibody Technology Pte Ltd in close collaboration with the Supreme Court, the Subordinate Courts and the Attorney-General's Chambers, together with Pacific Internet and Hewlett Packard. However the development of a nationwide broadband infrastructure in Singapore and the widespread adoption of high-speed broadband internet access amongst law firms has been one of the key factors in making the Internet the preferred platform on which to build a cost-effective yet robust videoconferencing system. www.justiceonline.com.sg

ROLL ON STICKY FRIDAY
Along with our monthly Hitlist of the UK's busiest legal sites based on visitor traffic, the Insider web site also carries a realtime data feed containing details of the top 10 stickiest legal web sites. 'Stickiness' in this case being defined as the sites that attract and keep visitors looking at their pages for longer than the average session time. Currently the average session time is just over 5 minutes and the sites that consistently attracted above average session times as Westlaw at 13 minutes, followed by Lexis-Nexis and the European Patent Office - both clocking up about 10 minute session times.

However when Friday comes along even the big two online legal publishers are given a run for their money by www.rollonfriday.com - the news, gossip and entertainment site for all those assistant solicitors working as cannon fodder in the large City of London firms. From our surveys, RollOnFriday has consistently been one of the top 5 stickiest legal sites for at least the past nine months.