The Solicitors Online Blog

A Sole Practitioner in the Internet age

2011-11-14T11:42:49Z

(This is an article which was first published in the Internet Newsletter)

The internet is becoming increasingly important for all businesses and law is not exempt from this.

I have been fascinated by the Internet ever since I discovered, on buying my first computer when setting up as a sole practitioner in 1994, that there was this thing called the internet, where computers could talk to each other through telephone lines.

I truly believe that over the next 100 years it will bring in changes of the same magnitude as those brought in by the development of the printing press and the telegraph. Already we are able to collaborate with colleagues in real time wherever they are in the world; blogging allows us all to be journalists and the growing popularity of ebooks allows us all to become publishers.

In this new world, the sole practitioner solicitor has a big advantage over his colleagues in larger firms. He (or in my case she) can develop new ideas and services without having to get them past hostile partners. My partnership meetings (of one) are invariably harmonious and generally productive!

If you have a good idea, it is possible, if you have the right skills or a good web designer, to get it online within days or in some cases, hours.

So how can the sole practitioner (or small firm lawyer) take advantage of the opportunities presented by the internet?

The membership site

I set up my membership site, Landlord Law ten years ago. At that time, I had to get bespoke software specially written, but nowadays membership sites can be built fairly easily from open source software such as WordPress and Drupal (the software Landlord Law uses).

If you are a techie, you may even be able to create your own site, using WordPress and plugins. There are courses online to help you do this sort of thing.

What can you provide in a membership site? My site, Landlord Law, is aimed at landlords, tenants, letting agents and housing advisors. The services provided fall into the following groups:

Information – e.g. FAQ, articles and the like
Documents – tenancy agreements, notices, standard letters etc
One to one help – principally provided via the members discussion forum but I also ‘sell’ fixed fee telephone and written advice
Casework. I offer standard repossession work, for fixed fees.

When Landlord Law was launched in 2001 case work was the biggest part of my income. Now it is the membership subscriptions which are more important.

I am lucky in having a small discrete area of law which lends itself to this subscription service model. However it is not the only one. Have a think about your practice. Is there any specific area where clients would appreciate (and pay for) an online service to keep them up to date?

Where you could also provide precedent documents and give some quick advice in a forum? Most people don’t want a great long written opinion, they just want a quick pointer, or perhaps a bit of reassurance that they are on the right path. You can do this really easily in a forum – and your answers will also help the other members and enrich the site generally.

An online instruction facility for basic case work is also worthwhile. For standard repossession cases it is not necessary for clients to come in and talk to me about it. All they need to do is give details and send over the documents so I can get on with it. My service also requires payment in advance. This means no bad debts which is a considerable saving in time and irritation.

Some case work requires more client contact than this of course, but I expect you do at least some work which would fit this model.

Blogging

It is no good just putting up a membership site and expecting hundreds of members. You have to market it and one of the best ways to do this is with a blog.

When people are considering paying for a service, they like to know a bit about the person or company providing it. A blog lets you show that you ‘know your stuff’ and are a suitable person to help them.

It will also help raise your profile generally, in particular in the search engines. Inevitably your articles will have ‘keywords’ relevant to your service, making you easy to find for someone searching for information in your niche.

There is a lot of writing involved in keeping a blog though. You also need to write in an ‘easy’ style which ordinary people will understand. You don’t want to come across as a pompous fusty lawyer type, as this will put people off.

(Note, you can see my ‘professional blog’ Landlord Law Blog here.

Audio and video

Writing is not the only option. You can record and publish audio ‘podcasts’. This is surprisingly easy to do, and the podcasts can be promoted via your blog and registered on itunes. People can then subscribe and download your podcasts regularly.

Lots of people enjoy listening to podcasts, for example in the car, while walking the dog, at the gym etc. Through listening to your voice regularly they will come to feel they know you, making you an obvious choice if they need legal help.

Or what about ‘vlogging’ – Video blogging? If you have a camcorder you can set this up on a tripod and speak to the nation regularly, updating them with news and comment on your niche. This can easily be published on your blog. You can also set up your own Your Tube channel and publish it there. It’s really not that difficult.

Twitter

People often think twitter must be silly, because of its name, and how can you say anything sensible in 140 characters? Actually you would be surprised but that’s not the point. If you have a blog, you need a twitter account because it is an important way to promote your blog posts.

A vast amount of twitter traffic consists of people either publishing a ‘tweet’ about their new blog post, or recommending (or ‘re-tweeting’) someone else’s blog post. You need to become a part of this. It needn’t take a lot of time (although it can do if you are not careful).

As a sole practitioner you have an advantage in that you can tweet for your business under your own name. People like to follow a real person with a real photo in their twitter profile.

Let’s talk technical

Blogs are quite easy to set up. You can set up a blog using the free Google software on Blogger in a couple of hours. However if you are serious about blogging it is best to have a self hosted blog, maybe as part of your firm website.

WordPress is the most popular blogging software. Many web hosting companies provide it for free and you can install it with just a couple of clicks. You then need to customise it with a ‘theme’ to give it an individual look.

I use a brilliant premium theme called Headway (affilate link), which has a ‘visual editor’ allowing you to change the appearance of your site without using code. You can further customise your blog with bits of add on software called ‘plugins’ of which there are thousands, for all kinds of purpose.

Or you can just commission your web designer to create a bespoke website and leave it at that, but I find that half the fun is messing about and tweaking my site.

Newsletters

As well as writing your blog, and giving out useful nuggets of information to your followers on twitter, you should produce a regular newsletter.

This performs a number of functions. It keeps you in the forefront of your clients mind, making you (hopefully) the obvious choice for legal work if they need it. You can also use it to sell your services and any products you may decide to produce (see later).

However remember that it is all too easy for people to consign your newsletter to the spam folder. Once this is done, all future newsletters will go there automatically, so they simply won’t see them. Try not to do anything which would make them want to do this.

If you decide to set up a newsletter it is a good idea to use one of the specialist companies such as Constant Contact, Aweber or Mailchimp. If you are worried about producing content there are firms out there who will do this for you, such as www.words4business.com.

Be your own publisher

If you write a book nowadays, you do not need to worry about publishers. You can do it yourself! With the growing popularity of kindle, ipad and other ebook readers, people are increasingly buying ebooks rather than paper books, and they are not hard to create.

The ebook can either be given away for free, maybe as an incentive to get people to sign up to your mailing list, or be sold via your website to form an extra income stream.

Many people sell their ebooks using an online service called ‘e-junkie’ which is fairly easy to use and very cheap. Alternatively you can add a shopping cart to your blog or website. You will need one which will allow you to sell digital downloads.

I have set up a whole new ecommerce business recently with my web designer specifically to sell my ebooks and kits, which we produce ourselves called Your Law Store. This has already started to make a modest profit

Conclusion

With the ever increasing complexity of our world, people are crying out for easy ways to understand information about the regulations which affect their daily lives. Lawyers are the best people to provide this. The internet is the perfect medium for providing it, promoting it, and selling it.

If you are a sole practitioner who likes writing, has keyboard skills and enjoys messing around with computers, the world is your oyster!

UK Blawg Roundup #7 – and the future of legal blogging

2011-06-17T18:49:17Z

The British blawg / law blog

Welcome to the June 2011 UK Blawg review, a quarterly round up of British Blawgs (legal blogs) and discussion.

In the last Blawg Reivew, Brian Inkster took the past as his theme. Speaking from his newly materialised Time Blawg, he took us on a journey back into the mists of 2006 (or even earlier), before whisking us back again to see where those original bloggers were today.

Today I am going to see if the UK Blawg time rotor can give us a peek into the future. One of the things I will be looking at is whether blogs are just a frivolous fancy, or whether they can be a serious support to a law practice.

Because this is the year when everything changes. Deregulation is coming in October (2011) as the Legal Services Act 2007 finally comes into force. Lawyers (they say) are going to be forced to do things differently. Will blogging be a part of this new future?

I start with a serious and thought provoking post, the time is now from Viv Williams on Legal Futures which discusses the problems raised by deregulation and the options available to law firms. Well worth reading if you are a law firm principal. We all need to think about these things.

But back to blogging.

#Lawblogs

Blogging inspires passion among its practitioners, and there have been several law blog events, none of which sadly I have been able to attend (living as I do in the wilds of Norfolk – or Norwich as many people call it). The most recent event took place on 19 May 2011 and had as its theme the future of legal blogging.

It appears to have been well attended and was reported online by Siobhain Butterworth of the Guardian who commented that “blawgs seems to be in blossom”. (It was also reported in the Times but I can’t show you that as it is behind their paywall).

The event brought forth an interesting crop of blogs on what the future of legal blogging might be.

James Wilson writing on Halsburys Law Exchange feels that legal blogging ensures more debate about the rules that govern us, and keeps better scrutiny on those who make and enforce them, which has to be a good thing

Adam Wagner writing on the UK Human Rights Blog is more concerned about the ethical side of blogging – do lawyers have a duty to correct errors in the press about legal cases, and explain the law to the general public?

Law student Dylan White found the event inspiring and thinks that the current crop of law students is the future of blogging

Emily Albon writing on Lawbore Future Lawyer thinks it is a great way for law students to show their engagement with the subject, and has many benefits to the student blogger, not least helping them find a job in due course.

But, firmly grasping the commercial nettle in his canny Scottish fist, Brian Inkster asks is law firm business development the elephant in the #LawBlogs room? A question answered in part in the vigorous debate which followed in the comments section. Brian’s posts generally attract vigorous comments – a sign of a good blog.

So we have a number of themes identified there:

Providing informed comment on legal topics and news items
Educating the public
Correcting reporting errors
Keeping a scrutiny on law makers and enforcers
Supporting a law firm / promoting the writer

I think I would add to that, writing for the love of it. Anybody who chooses to write a blog and keeps it up for more than a year, must enjoy writing or they wouldn’t bother with it.

So lets go look at British law bloggers blogs and see what they are doing.

The top ten blogs of 2011

Where can we find law blogs? One place I discovered recently is Cisions list of top ten Law Blogs. Cisions is a resource for PR and communications professionals – lets see which blogs they put at the top. In reverse order:

No 10 is Pangloss from Lillian Edwards, Professor of E-Governance at The Law School of Strathclyde University who writes on online privacy and security law, cybercrime, online intermediary law, etc etc. Recent posts include Do you want to know a secret about twitter and superinjunctions and Return of the Robots! and Hay on Wye Festival! which looks at re-drawing (Sci fi writer) Asimov’s laws of robotics.

No 9 is Pink Tape – a blog from Lucy Read of the family bar. She covers all manner of things, from a talk by HH Judge Bellamy (not y’know, the wildlife bloke, but the other one), to legal blogging goes boom

No 8 is my blog - The Landlord Law Blog. Here I mostly have educational posts for landlords / tenants such as What can you do if your tenant just WON”T GO!, and comments on news items such as Tenancy Deposits – the law that never was plus there is the newish blog clinic where I publish readers problems, such as International students still waiting for their deposit after three months

No 7 is the Marilyn Stowe Blog – a very professional looking blog and the winner of the UK Blawg awards 2010 no less! This is a family law blawg – and she has recently considered what makes a good family law blogger , as well as looking at Michelle Obamas sound relationship advice and how to avoid the CSA.

No 6 is Law Actually an amusing blog from “a typically deranged law graduate, with a poor taste in blogging and too much spare time on his hands” who in between posts works in-house for a wholesale business telcoms operator. He serves up an entertaining mix of commentary such as Woman goes hyper at dunkin donuts, lawyer in waitering funds law degree by dropping trousers and the unfortunate (although probably fictitious) story of Employees & the right to erm … play at work.

No 5 is the well respected Head of Legal blog from barrister and former government worker Carl Gardner. I can remember Head of Legal from way back in the early days of legal blogging. He comments on legal stories in the news such as can the Danes ban Marmite? and Mosely v. UK.

No 4 is the UK Human Rights Blog – from barristers chambers One Crown Office Way publishing several human rights posts daily. This blog burst upon the blawgosphere fairly recently but is up there with the best. Recent posts include why religious freedom does not stop at the prison gate and how the police may have a duty to inform victims of phone hacking .

No 3 is Tim Kevan’s barristers blog. This is fairly self promotional at the moment with lots of posts about reviews of his book and a few sponsored posts and book reviews.

No 2 is the Magistrates Blog – another long running and very well respected blog. The Magistrates Blog is anonymous and and all names in cases are changed. A recent oddments from the front line post had a very sad and telling comment from a South London JP on the day his court closed and the insensitivity of HMCTS, and plate sin with gold looks at the nature of theft.

The top spot (cue drum roll) is taken by Charon QC, an enormously popular legal blog which has been around for a very long time. Charon QC himself apparently does not exist (so how come he does all those podcasts then?) but is a figment in the imagination of law lecturer Mike Semple Piggot.

In view of this it is perhaps not surprising that in a recent post the learned QC (or maybe his alter ego) had a few things to say about the new college of humanities. Other recent posts include episodes from the continuing story of that ever popular and ethically rock sold law firm Muttley Dastardly LLP plus various law reviews, for example on Legal tweeters on TV – Miscarriages of Justice – Politicians interfering with the judiciary?

Charon QC is probably the best known of all the legal blogs, partly because it has been around for such a long time, but mainly of course because it is a stonking good blog.

So thats the Cisions top ten for May 2011. Its also interesting to see what their top ten was the last time they reviewed law blogs in September 2009. All of the blogs listed are still going (albeit some maybe in a slightly different format).

The top ten blogs of 2009

Here the countdown was as follows:

No 10 – PJH Law – an employment law blog, rather difficult to find from their sites home page, recent posts include wasted costs – acting in pursuit of profit and payment in lieu

No 9 – Family Lore from John Bloch – John is a long established and well known family law blogger, and I was surprised not to see him in the 2011 list. I have a soft spot for Family Lore as it was reading this which inspired me to start blogging way back in 2006. Recent posts include one on how divorces can be aimiable and one about a considerably less amiable couple spying on each other on facebook His blog is also home to the family law wiki.

No 8 – Yay! Me again! – Landlord Law Blog

No 7 - Current awareness from the Inner Temple Library. This seems to be mostly extracts from online news reports and links to them. Looks like it could be a good source of stories for the law humour blogs.

No 6 – the Barrister Blog (Tim Kevan) again

No 5 – Nearly Legal. I know the Nearly Legal blog very well as it deals with my area of law, ie Landlord and Tenant, although NL covers all the social housing cases whereas I just do the private sector. Nearly Legal himself is actually a good example of how writing a blog can help with your career. He started it back in 2006 while unqualified (hence ‘nearly legal’) and has since qualified and works now at a good London legal aid firm (I was going to say a quality firm but that word is now perhaps best avoided).

Nearly Legal is now written by a team of solicitors and barristers (including the original NL) and provides what is more or less a legal reporting service on case law in the housing area. It is hugely respected and rightly so. Generally the reporting is straight and serious, but I commend to you Hot tub lovin’, the Daily Mail and Article 8 (don’t ask) and Oh Cluck where NL considers setting up a specialist hen and rabbit practice.

No 4 – panGLos (as aforesaid)

No 3 – Baby Barrista from Tim Kevan – formerly in the Times but now (since the paywall came in) in the Guardian and on its own site here. This as everyone will know is the account of a fictional junior barrister. Recently he has been considering selling off the Inns of court and upholding the rule of law.

No 2 – Binary Law from publishing consultant Nick Holmes (who also produces, with Delia Venables, the excellent Internet Newsletter and who initiated the Free Legal Web). Nick has probably been blogging longer than any of us, as he set up in February 2004! Nick tends to concentrate on publishing related posts such as Innovations in law publishing and the death of (some) print but of particular interest to us today is his post Too many #LawBlogs?

The no. 1 post in 2009 was the excellent Magistrates Blog, so not a lot of change there as it is No 2 now.

Some more blogs

A few (well quite a lot really) other notable blogs I need to mention are as follows

The Jack of Kent blog, from London lawyer and writer provides intellectual comment on the news, with some philosophical musing thrown in. Posts range from legal gags on Wikileaks to whether Pippa Middleton should have a page on Wikipedia (answer, yes).

Trouble Ahead from Mike Scutt is specifically about UK legal services deregulation. Recent posts include the The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Legal Services Act and countdown to the LSA where he provides a handy list of acronyms.

Mike also blogs as Jobsworth on his legal specialism Employment law where he asks whether the government should cap discriminaton awards and whether stressed workers are more at risk of redundancy.

Legaleaglemhm is from Scottish law student Michelle containing her diary of a trainee solicitor. A recent post includes Legaleaglemhm TOP TIPS for Law EXAM revision

Julian Summerhayes is a solicitor turned coach / consultant and blogs about legal practice and social media. Recent posts include why lawyers hate the telephone and people learning and development

In house lawyer looks at how lawyers can uses social media to best effect, for example looking at what Linkedin map says about Linkedin and reflecting on contract law

Alrichs weblog from journalist Alan Rich looks at legal related items in the news such as the Jonathan Sumption debacle and Privacy, human rights, horizontality and the issue of judicial underwear

Steven Mather has a rather snazzy blog which covers legal, mediation and geeky issues among others. He is asking if chimps are more intelligent than most under 16s and looks at Ken Clarke’s plans for compulsory mediation of small claims.

piBlawg from 1 Chancery Lane covers personal injury issues eg we are the village green preservation sociey, God save Donald Duck, vaudeville and variety and the fashon for fraud

The William Flack Blog is another housing law blog from social welfare lawyer William Flack, who is wondering if the telephone gateway to legal aid services is a good thing and has a few thoughts on Sharon Shoesmiths sucessful appeal. William has also set up a social welfare law wiki

Paul Hajek’s Clutton Cox site has a number of different property related blogs, for example a post on setting up home with an unmarried partner and the perils of undervalued probate properties

Legal 2.0 is from Jon Busby, Business Development Director at Epoq Legal. He wants to know if you want the truth or somethig beautiful and talks about how legal tech can do much more than make you accessible (well he would wouldn’t he?)

The LegalBratBlawg is from Tim Bratton general counsel at the Financial Times, who has recently looked at the case for self regulation – however I found his white font on dark background blog very difficult to read – am I alone in this?

John Floods Random Academic Thoughts is another long established blog, recently he has been telling us that we might not have realised that the world was ending, and looking at risk management in from father confessor to compliance officer

Law and lawyers from Obiter J looks at legal issues in the news and is currently running a very helpful series our law and the legal system, the most recent post being on the Judges

The Bizzie is an in house lawyer who has been considering how aliens can help you write off your debts and the state of the union

Motoring lawyers online blog supports Steve Williams online motoring law service and discusses relevant issues such as drink drive limits to remain the same and drink driving defences

Likewise Shireen Smiths Blog supports her trademark / copyriight law practice – recent posts include twitter etiquette – twitiquette and innovation as differentiation

Jonathan Lea’s Posterious blog is more of a place where he thinks aloud – currently he is wondering if social media can replace the banks and considering the future of law firms.

Penninsulawyer is from Jon Bloor in the Wirral, where he is looking at format shifting copyright and the cloud and the differences between writing for print and screen (if you blog – just read it!).

The Pain Smith landlord and tenant blog is very well known to me, working as we do in the same field, and is full of excellent posts, and sometimes breaking news of their own cases. For instance in the Potts v. Dansley Pays case. It is also, like many blawgs, reminding people that Bailii is appealing for funds.

Finally, I would like to include a blog which I have enjoyed for some years, Technollama. The author, formerly a lecturer at University of Edinburgh School of Law has now returned to his ancestral acres in Costa Rica but as his blog remains as entertaining as ever, I venture to include it. For example in a recent post on the internet nobody knows youre a meme he has some excellent advice for dealing with strangers on the internet. He also wonders if we should have any expectations of privacy in the internet age.

Pause for reflection

So, having had a whistle stop tour around the legal blogosphere (with apologies to anyone who has accidentially been left out), what does it say about blogging and the future of the profession?

There is as we have seen a huge range of blogs, running from the mostly commercial, which are mainly about the authors products, to the blogs (particularly the anonymous ones) which are written purely for the love of it with no expectation of reward..

There are numerious examples of blogs dealing with all the themes identified at #lawblogs, with many blogs falling into more than one catetory. Lets take a look.

Providing informed comment on legal topics and news items

Most blogs do this to some extent or other. Some are humorous such as Law Actually, and some mainly comment on political and current news items, for example Head of Legal blog and Alrichs weblog. Others keep readers up to date in their particular field, such as the Pain Smith blog and Technolama.

Educating the public

Most blawgs consider this to be one of their main raison d’être. For example if you want to know what it is like being a Magistrate – read the Magistrates blog. If you want to know want the top human rights issues are today – read the UK Human Rights blog. If you want to know what its like being a trainee solicitor, read LeagleagleMHM’s diary of a trainee solicitor.

For those of us who blog under our own or our firms name, it is not entirely altruistic. ‘Content marketing’ as it is called, is a proven method of marketing. It consists providing useful and helpful content to the public on the basis that it will raise the bloggers profile (and the profile of their business) and improve their chances of survival in a hostile world.

For example, my Landlord Law blog publishes a lot of educational material, as does Steve Williams Motoring lawyers online. Then, some excellent blogs are written with lawyers as potential customers in mind, for example Julian Summerhayes and Legal 2.0 from Jon Busby.

Free Legal Web. On the theme of education, I must mention again the innovative and rather wonderful Free Legal Web. This collects legal articles and blogs published around the blogosphere and publishes them all in one place to make life easier for the seeker after legal knowledge.

The FLW is presently concentrating on housing law, and the three main housing blogs (Nearly Legal, Pain Smith and my own – although we are not the only contributors) all have special categories on our blogs for FLW so posts can easily be uploaded to the beta housing law pilot. However I believe Nick has plans to extend FLW to other areas of law. You can read more about it all here.

Correcting reporting errors

The barristers blogs do a very good job with this, for example the Human Rights Blog and Nearly Legal (although NL has both barrister and solicitor writers). However there are sometimes restrictions on what barristers can say about their own cases – discussed by Adam Wagner on the UK Human Righsts blog here.

Keeping a scrutiny on law makers and enforcers

Lawyers blogs, due to their specialist knowledge, are well placed to do this. For example most blawgs are united in condemning the gradual dismantling over time by government of our once proud legal aid scheme. In my own area we have all been highly critical of the tenancy deposit legislation. Other niche blogs will do the same for topics in their area of expertise.

Supporting a law firm or promoting the writer

One reason why many of us blog is to support our business, and there is nothing wrong with this. But does it work?

Brian Inkster asked this question on the Time Blawg – do clients search online for a solicitor? The answer seemed to be probably yes. My experience has been very much “yes” and Paul Hajek has also had a big success with his property blogs. It would be great if some legal bloggers could leave a comment below about the effect their blog has had on their practice.

Writing for the love of it

I suspect that this applies to most blogs, certainly the ones that last. I first started blogging because I wanted to write and express myself. It takes a lot of effort to maintain a blog – it should be something you enjoy doing – otherwise why do it?

Many of the blogs discussed above deal with things which interest the writer, and are perhaps written more for themselves or other lawyers than for clients. For example Jon Bloor’s Penninsulawyer and Brian Inkster’s Time Blawg. And indeed the blog you are on right now (or should be, unless this post has been scraped), my Solicitors Onlne blog, which I set up when I decided to limit my Landlord Law blog to landlord and tenant topics only.

We’re all publishers now

One of the wonderful things about this new interconnected world we live in, is that we can all be publishers now. Gone are the days of having to kow tow to ‘them upstairs’ for a book contract or a column in the paper. All it takes is a bit fiddling around on blogger or one of the other free providers and Bobs your uncle!

So are blogs set to grow into the future? You bet they are! As we have seen, there are masses of thriving and interesting law blogs out there covering a huge and diverse spectrum of legal topics. Their authors do not look like stopping any time soon.

But what do YOU think? You’ll find a comment box just below…

Charles Dickens blogging photo by Mike Licht

Your Law Store, Zollch and product launches

2011-06-10T20:42:06Z

This really is a time of change for me. The new Landlord Law site is chugging away nicely so I have time for new ventures.

Zollch Ltd

The most exciting of these is the new company I have set up with my long term web designer Gill Bishop. We have called the company Zollch Ltd – a nonsense word with no known associations which we can use for more or less anything.

Your Law Store

We have started by setting up an online ecommerce store to sell my ebooks and kits for landlords, tenants and advisors. Not everyone wants to join a membership site, and it is nice to be able to produce different products.

The estore is called Your Law Store and we started it off by launching my ebook on assured shorthold tenancies and section 21.

Product launches

Product launches are a new thing for me – a few months ago I had a mad extravagant moment and signed up for Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Forumula course. I have been reading about this for a couple of years now, so as I was set to sell products, it seemed a good idea.

I think probably it is one of the best business investments I have ever made.

Within a few weeks of doing the course I was able to supplement my income by a ‘quick launch’ over Easter which netted me some £2,300. The section 21 ebook launch in early June also went really well, particularly bearing in mind that I had already sold over 100 of the ebooks earlier in the year during its ‘beta launch’.

But Zollch is not going to be just for ecommerce.

Consultancy?

Another thing we have considered is consultancy. If solicitors firms are thinking of offering online services, Gill and I have both been there and done it for the past ten years. So we could offer a pretty nice advisory service for anyone who wanted it.

Between us, we cover most things. I (as a practising solicitor of over 20 years) can analyse their practice to see what options are available to them and offer advice and support, while Gill can deal with the more technical side of things such as constructing websites. I could even help with a product launch now, to raise the finance to pay for the project!

Whether any firms would be interested in such a service remains to be seen (we have had one enquiry), but it is available if needed. Although in the meantime we have plenty to do with Your Law Store. Indeed so much that it is difficult sometimes to know what to do first.

Its a wonderful world

But there are such marvellous opportunities today to create your own products – for example I can now, using reasonably priced software and online services, create promotional videos and publish them online. Ten years, or even two years ago I could never have done that!

These are exciting times.

Storage solutions – Amazon web service and S3Stats

2011-02-21T00:23:00Z

I have started going into multi media. There is the Landlord Law Podcasts and the Landlord Law YouTube channel. Exciting stuff. And I am planning to do more audios and videos, both promotional and in due course as part of the content of my membership site.

However these mulitmedia files are very big. I was shocked when I saw how large my audio files were, and found out that they tend to be about a MB a minute. There is the problem about loading them up to blogs and sites in the first place, and then the strain that they can place on your server. Particuarly if lots of people want to use them at the same.

The answer to this it seems is Amazon. I always thought of Amazon as primarily an online bookshop, even though they have branched out into all sorts of other things, even shoes and garden furniture. I have been a fan of Amazon for many years.

However they also provide online storage space, under the name Amazon Web Services. It seems that it is both very cheap and very secure and reliable. If you are not a died in the wool techie its all a bit confusing, but I now feel reasonably confident with their simple storage solution Amazon S3.

You have to sign up, although if you have an ordinary Amazon account you use the same login etc. When in the S3 area you have to set up buckets to store things in. Then in the buckets you can put more folders to sort things and then load up your files. Bingo! You can link to them easily on your blog (so long as you remember to tell Amazon that they are public files).

I did this a week or so, loading up my podcast audio files and various other things. I felt pretty pleased with myself until I realised that there was no way I could track how many people downloaded and listened to or watched my files!

I had a rummage around on Amazon itself and found that you could activate something called logging which would record details. Yippee! I thought, sorted, and duly activated. However a couple of days later I found the folders full of all these logs, which I did not know what to do with or understand. Surely there must be an answer?

There is, and its name is S3Stat. You sign up with them, set up some keys which let them access your Amazon S3 storage area, and then they get busy and start analyzing them. So finally I was able to learn that in the 24 hours since I signed up, six people had downloaded my podcast (its now gone up a bit)!

Its a pretty good service at a minuscule price, $5 per month (about £3). However they also have a ‘Cheap Bastard’ plan which allows you to have the service for free if only you write about them online.

Hence of course this article! Its a pretty good service. You might want to check it out.

The turn of the year – and the start of a decade

2011-01-01T23:53:54Z

A new year today, nay, a new decade. 2011. A hundred years ago my grandmother was 7, in those last few years before the Great War.

I very much hope that this century we can avoid such horrors and remain, more or less, at peace.

In my life there are a number of new things. As mentioned in a previous post, I spent most of last year getting my new Landlord Law web-site ready to launch on the world, and now I have a new toy to play with. New things beckon, ebooks, podcasts and courses are some of the things I have in mind. Watch this space.

On a more domestic level, I have celebrated the new year by moving my desk from one side of the office to another. A difficult job, which has left one of the internet box thingys stranded in the middle of the floor. The cable (our internet is cable) is too short to reach my desk now, under which the rest of the cables writhe together in decent privacy. Apparently Virgin are going to need paying £150 to move it over to join them.

One reason for the move (the desk move that is) is to get me away from the draughts coming in through the front door and window, and closer to the fire (and thus hopefully stop my back playing up). However I feel it also symbolises the change from one web-site to another, to new ways of working, and to new ideas and initiatives. Towards a greater prosperity I hope.

And then today I learn that my friend and UK Lawyers collaborator Brian Inkster, has started a new blog – the Time Blawg – materialising out of the nether space to take its place among the canon of British Blawgs. Good luck with it Brian!

This year is of course the year when everything changes in the legal profession, with the coming into force of the Legal Services Act. None of us know yet whether it will be a bang or a whimper or just a slow burn. But those firms with foresight are positioning themselves to move forward into the future.

So an interesting year awaits. I have started the year as I mean to go on, by working on my new web-site and watching old Doctor Who DVDs.

What are your plans and where do you think the new year and decade will take us?

The new Landlord Law – the reality

2010-12-22T21:47:21Z

Well, further to my previous post, Landlord Law has now gone live. Its basically, good but there have been a few problems.

Landlord Law! Where is it?

The first thing was the massive delay in seeing it. We switched the namesevers over early on Wednesday, and lots of people started logging in and using the new site. However I didn’t see it until Thursday morning! I got an email from one member on Friday saying that he was still seeing the old site!

Still as it is now a week since we switched, I would hope that everyone now is being directed to the right place.

Most of the site is working perfectly, and fully bears out my web designer’s choice of Drupal. People have also been very complementary about the fabulous design (all down to Gill) and many also say the navigation is easier.

There are just two problems. I suppose it is only to be expected with an import of data between two totally different systems, but there have been problems with the members access.

The members access problem

Some members can get in fine. However many appear to be blocked. Others, although their details are there, have lost their membership status. These are all quite easily dealt with by me, but it takes time. I have to check their membership records on the old site and then make sure that what they have on the new site corresponds. And I have to unblock their membership when it has been blocked.

Sometimes when I do this, the member gets a once only login link email sent out by the site, and sometimes they don’t. I haven’t quite worked out what triggers this yet.

A couple of days after launch I sent out a newsflash telling everyone we were now live, and asking them to check their login.

Pandemonium!

Loads of people emailed in saying that they were locked out and I had a very busy time sorting them. I am still getting quite a few every day and I expect this to go on for some time. Still at least once I have sorted things out ’round the back’ they are able to log in all right and use the site. Well most of it.

The document generator problem

The document generator has quite frankly been a nightmare. As I discussed in my last post. However what I did not tell you there, was that we had to launch before it was completely finished.

When you generate a document (by filling in fields which I have set up and then clicking the button at the bottom) you get taken to a My Documents area. This is where you download it. There you see a list of all the documents you have generated with the most recent at the top. There are then three buttons, view (just to look at it), pdf (to load it as a pdf) and delete.

There was supposed to be a fourth button. This was edit, and it was supposed to take you back to the form filling bit, if you found you had made a mistake, so you could do it again.

However shortly before launch I found that this was not working. I didn’t want to hold up launch any longer (as it was already about five months overdue) so we decided to go ahead without it. HOPEFULLY the software designer Joop will be getting this done asap after Christmas.

However obviously people do make mistakes, and want to go back and change things. Not having the edit button, I suppose they are using the back button. Just guessing but I strongly suspect that this is the reason why so many people are emailing me saying that they are getting locked out of their My Documents area and are unable to load their documents.

So I am having to calm them down about that and, if they really can’t get it to work, send them one of the pdfs from the old site.

Site offline!

Then this morning, I went to check a link and found it was not loading. Horrors! Then I checked a few more links, and found that the WHOLE SITE was not loading. EEurgh!

My first panic thought was that it was something with the software, and that the whole site would be lost just after launch, and we would have to go back to the old one, while we rebuilt it. However no, thankfully that was not the problem. It was a server error.

But this is where the value of using a posh server company like UK Fast comes in. They have engineers there 24/7 and within about half an hour of my reporting the incident to them they had sorted it. AND later they sent me an incident report saying exactly what had happened. Which I never got from my old hosting company.

Still I rather hope it never happens again,

Heigh ho! But apart from these things (and the member and doc generator problems will no doubt be sorted in time) it is a great site and I am really pleased with it.

Have you had a look at it yet? You will find it >> here.

The impossible journey

2010-12-17T19:36:36Z

A new year, a new Landlord Law

It started in January. I decided to change hosting companies and asked my web designer if my website (that is my membership site Landlord Law) could be moved over to the new company I had chosen which is called UK Fast.

Turned out that they couldn’t, so I decided instead to commission the new site that we had been talking about for the past year or so. It took a while to get a quote out of them (it always does somehow) but by about March time we had a specification and a quotation. And a date for launch. It was definitely going to be the end of June.

The quotation was, as it always is, more than I expected. But the service did really need an upgrade and this was to be a completely new site. My web designer, Gill, decided that Drupal would be the best solution for my service, as Landlord Law is large and complex and Drupal is good for this.

Death in June

March through to June my web designer was doing research and preliminary setting up. June we planned for me to take a trip to see her (she lives in the West Country), meet the software designer, and move things forward. Launch, it seemed, could not be the end of June after all, but would probably be by the end of the summer.

Life has a way of intervening in the best laid plans, and very sadly Gills father died just at the time I was due to travel down there (in fact I was on the train when she rang me), and the trip had to be put back.

Needless to say this put a bit of a stop on the project for a few weeks. However in mid July the West Country trip took place – a good visit, we got a lot done, although on the way back my laptop got destroyed by a bottle of water.

The content transfer begins

August I was able to start working on the site and begin the long job of transferring the content over. I hadn’t realised quite how much content I had on Landlord Law! Not only did I have to copy it over, but also to check it and update it where necessary.

At the same time I had to learn Drupal. Drupal is a brilliant system, really brilliant, but it is not the easiest in the world to get the hang of. And my web designer is brilliant at web design and creation, not teaching, so I was often having to work things out for myself. It is probably very good for me (stimulates the brain cells and all that), and I do puzzle things out in the end, but it is not the easiest way to do things.

Gill also had her problems. This is her first Drupal site, so a lot of learning for her too. Everything took about twice as long as we thought it would – if we were lucky!

The dreaded document generator

Then there was the document generator software I had commissioned. This was to be a new way of generating the tenancy agreements, letters and other forms. I had met the software designer, Joop (he’s Dutch), on my trip to see Gill, but at that time we had not, much to my disappointment, been able to actually generate a document.

Time went by, ‘When are we going to have the document generator?’ I would ask Gill, and not really get an answer. Eventually I got some abbreviated instructions which I found completely impossible to follow, and decided to leave it for a bit.

Then one day I decided that I really needed to get a grip on this stuff, so I spent a WHOLE DAY trying to work it out. Total failure. Panic started to set in. The document generator was crucial to the whole new vision for the site, and we could not really launch without it.

I managed to extract a few more instructions, and eventually one day was able to get it to generate a document. Da daaHH! However, it was just producing one simple document, and was not functioning as the all singing all dancing product I had been promised. I carried on transferring content and hoped.

Then one day I had a lightbulb moment and said to Gill, ‘Why don’t we just use the document generator in a simple way, doing one document at a time, just to get the site launched, and see about the more complicated stuff later’. From that moment launch once again became a possibility.

Final stuff

So then we were doing the more complex final stuff. I had to put the tenancy agreements online to be generated. October had come and passed and we were now moving into November. Problems were being fixed, but slowly.

I was spending a huge amount of time on decoration and navigation. Creating blocks to go in the side bar with navigation links (usually created via another complicated procedure in a module called ‘views’), and also lots of blocks with pictures of people.

Old people, young people, white people, black people, Chinese people, smiling people, worried people (not many of them) and happy looking people waving their credit cards in the air and clearly just about to buy a subscription. It will be interesting to see if they have any effect.

The other thing to do were the legal service instructions. There is a hideously complex procedure for getting someone to pay the fee and then be transferred over to an instruction form, and I still have a couple more to do. Likewise there are a few tenancy agreements which (slapped wrist) I have not done yet.

But we really needed to LAUNCH. I had hoped to do this before December but clearly this was not going to be possible. Gill was still wrestling with the subscriptions procedures and that is pretty fundamental.

Finally last week she said that she had got the subs nailed, and Joop was free to do the membership transfer, so we were on, for launch on Tuesday.

Launch?

That was today. The membership details have now been moved, although it took Joop ALL DAY to do it. I suppose there are rather a lot of them, Landlord Law has been online since November 2001. We now need to get the nameservers switched so the landlord law url points at UK Fast rather than the Bitenet server where it is now.

I am hoping that will get done tomorrow.

A new year, a new Landlord Law

So it has really taken almost the whole year (give or take a few weeks) to get to almost launch. A year in which I seem to have worked on and thought about very little else.

But it is a fabulous site, and hopefully when you are reading this, it will be online so you will be able to see it >> here.

It will be good to release it into the wild to see how it does, and I will finally be able to start working on something else. New developments which I have had in mind for months, new products to enhance the site and encourage signups, exciting new multimedia marketing initiatives, more feedback and contact with my members, and a new way of working.

Did I tell you that it will probably be the first social media online subscription service offered by a solicitors firm in the UK, ever? And this is only the beginning …

PHP – a journey into the unknown

2010-10-24T14:31:43Z

Php for lawyers?

Today and yesterday I did something which few solicitors of my generation have done, or will ever do.

I attended a computer training course on php (for beginners, naturally).

“What on earth” I hear you ask “is php?”

What is php?

Php which originally stood for Personal Home Page, when it was developed in 1994 by a Danish/Greenlandic programmer called Rasmus Lerdorf , is now short for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. And therefore has the dubious honour of being an acronym where the acronym itself is part of its own definition.

Its main home on the internet is php.net where it is defined as

a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.

Wikipedia has longer definition:

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document. As a general-purpose programming language, PHP code is processed by an interpreter application in command-line mode performing desired operating system operations and producing program output on its standard output channel. It may also function as a graphical application.

So now you know.

Basically it can be used to make websites ‘dynamic’. So, for example, if you click a link on a page and the content of the page changes as a result, that will often be because of the php code working away in the background, and then sending the right html code to your computer browser to make the page change its appearance.

It is also the code used in most open source software, to pull different bits together from a database (where they are all stored separately in lots of different tables), to produce a page.

For example WordPress, perhaps the most popular blog software around (its used for this blog for example), is built using php, also Drupal which is the software being used for my new Landlord Law web-site (still unfinished at the time of writing). Others include Moodle, Joomla and Media Wiki (the software used to drive Wikipedia).

The course experience

Attending a computer programming course was an interesting experience.

The other two students were of course men (apparently a lady at a computer training course is a rarety), and were considerably better at programming than me. But then they had both done a lot of programming previously, whereas I have not.

We had all brought our laptops along, and the course started off by having php installed on them. We then started learning what php can do, copying the code and seeing it work, and doing increasingly difficult exercises. These involved working out the code to make something specific happen.

It was interesting to see the difference between myself and my co-students. For most of the time, I found it virtually impossible to work the code out (as in, write it from scratch based on what I had been told). If I copied it very slowly however, I could dimly understand what it was doing and why. Which for me, I considered a result.

However on the morning of the second day, I had a flash of brilliance. We were doing some code which changed one set of words to another. As it was about words and not numbers, I found I could both follow what it was about, and adapt / develop a bit of code to make it work. Yippee!

However our next exercise was about making some sort of numerical calculator, and I was lost. My eyes glazed over and I could feel all intelligence drain from me.

I can do logical things with words (which is why I am a good lawyer) but not with numbers. Or not without a lot more difficulty. Which is different, as our teacher Michael Gruenberger said, from most of the people on his courses, who are generally better at the number stuff. Including the others on my course who were noticeably slower with the word exercise, but much better at everything else.

So what did I think of it?

The php course was a really good thing to do. I now have a much better grasp of what is possible, and what sort of things php will do. So the next thing is to get some books (already on order from Amazon) and work through them carefully (when I get the time).

This, I know, will help me get ideas for new ways of delivery of legal services online (for landlords and tenants). And it is just possible that some of them (the easy ones) I may even be able to develop myself! Watch this space …

In case you were wondering, the course was run by Cambridge IT Courses who provide computer training courses in Norwich, East Anglia and the Midlands.

A new Headway design for the Solicitors Online Blog

2010-10-07T16:07:52Z

The Headway blog theme

For some time, the design of this blog has been rather boring, essentially just dark blue and white. It was running the fabulous Headway theme but only version one.

The reason for this is that I had had problems upgrading. Indeed I had tried to upgrade one day only to have the ‘visual editor’ (which is the way you change things on the new Headways) die on me. Leaving me no option but to go back to version one and re-do everything. The original version 1 does not have the visual editor which is why I was forced to stay with it.

However a friend told me that the most recent version is pretty stable with most of the problems ironed out, so I thought I would give it another go. It worked a treat.

One of the things I really wanted to do with this blog was to put a dark blue background between the main posts area and the sidebar. This can only be done (if using Headway) via the visual editor.

That done, I had great fun trying out all the different combination’s of colours and style options. Some of them looked pretty weird. However I liked having the title in a paler blue band right across the screen, and then somehow putting the home and about links up the top seemed to work.

There were a few problems to resolve however. My thumbnail for excerpts plugin did not work any more, and my excerpts were thumbnailless. Horrors! However a quick hop over to the Headway forum brought forth the information that WP 3 has the facility to put thumbnails in the excepts now itself.

An examination of the post edit page did indeed reveal a new thumbnail item at the bottom left. However I then had to go through the whole of the blog allocating thumbnails, which was a bit of a pain. But done now.

Then there were the next post / previous post links. I had put these in manually, into the single post editor page, but this page was now gone! However again the HW forum reminded me of the Headway easy hooks feature which allows you to put things into tricky places on the blog.

A bit of messing around plus a change of the code I had been using, and, bingo! The thing was done. I think it is important to be able to move from one post to the next on a blog.

So there you are. A new design. It should do me for a while anyway. What do you think of it?

Review of the Copywriting Phrasebook by Amy Harrison

2010-10-05T22:23:49Z

The Copywriting Phrasebook

Words. My life is made up of words. I read them, I write them, I speak them and (professionally) I interpret them. As a writer and a lawyer they are the tools of my trade.

And yet there are still times when I stop mid way through a blog post halted by the need for a word. Not any word, but that one, that one on the tip of my tongue, …

Then if you are a blogger, there is the business of headings. All the gurus tell you that your heading is really important, but it is often difficult to know what to say.

Help from Amy Harrison

Well I have recently bought a little book that might help. Its an ebook (many of the books I buy nowadays are ebooks – you get to read them so much quicker) by a British copywriter called Amy Harrison.

As I said it is quite short. It has a section on headlines, and then sections with suggested words and phrases to help create different effects, along with words to avoid. This could be very useful, particularly for lawyers, for we often find it hard to write in the vernacular – our training tends towards long words and pompous phrases.

Although actually, I quite enjoy writing for a legal audience. Only then can you use hereinbefore written, as aforesaid, and hereinafter. Our deeds end by effluxion of time, our briefs complain about noxious fumes, and we baffle the unknowing with our talk of mens rea, inter alia and the ratio decidendi. Strange characters stalk through our writings – the officious bystander, the man on the Clapham Omnibus and of course Regina (or her father, Rex). We have our own secret meanings for execution, consideration and pleading, not to mention prayer, taxation, and being on all fours (a condition much sought after by Counsel).

But when writing for the public, these guilty pleasures must be put aside. We must use snappy phrases, contractions and slang. Short sentences and a casual approach.

If you are a lawyer and this is all too much for you, then Amy’s book will be a great help. And its only (at the moment) seven quid, give or take a dollar or two.

For more information see HarrisonAmy.

The Solicitors Online Blog

A Sole Practitioner in the Internet age

The membership site

Blogging

Audio and video

Twitter

Let’s talk technical

Newsletters

Be your own publisher

Conclusion

Related Posts:

UK Blawg Roundup #7 – and the future of legal blogging

The British blawg / law blog

#Lawblogs

So we have a number of themes identified there:

The top ten blogs of 2011

The top ten blogs of 2009

Some more blogs

Pause for reflection

Providing informed comment on legal topics and news items

Educating the public

Correcting reporting errors

Keeping a scrutiny on law makers and enforcers

Supporting a law firm or promoting the writer

Writing for the love of it

We’re all publishers now

Related Posts:

Your Law Store, Zollch and product launches

Zollch Ltd

Your Law Store

Product launches

Consultancy?

Its a wonderful world

Related Posts:

Storage solutions – Amazon web service and S3Stats

Related Posts:

The turn of the year – and the start of a decade

Related Posts:

The new Landlord Law – the reality

Landlord Law! Where is it?

The members access problem

The document generator problem

Site offline!

Related Posts:

The impossible journey

A new year, a new Landlord Law

Death in June

The content transfer begins

The dreaded document generator

Final stuff

Launch?

A new year, a new Landlord Law

Related Posts:

PHP – a journey into the unknown

Php for lawyers?

What is php?

The course experience

So what did I think of it?

Related Posts:

A new Headway design for the Solicitors Online Blog

The Headway blog theme

Related Posts:

Review of the Copywriting Phrasebook by Amy Harrison

The Copywriting Phrasebook

Help from Amy Harrison

Related Posts: