Website reviews

www.the-lawyer.co.uk [note the hyphen]

This newspaper format publication has for a long time been available on the net. Recognising the importance of the web from an early stage, the publishers have not only made the paper freely available, they have also enabled a search of its archive (around 25,000) articles going back to 1996. Helpfully, the articles can be searched for in a variety of ways and one can select a printer friendly version of the article. The layout suffers from a fair amount of flashing colour advertising which is a little off-putting, but reasonable enough when one considers the ample free resources made available. The site features a jobs page; fully customisable (search for your ideal partner…), a lawyer diary (PQE in England) and legal directories (including firms, barristers and legal technology suppliers). The news is updated daily.  The Lawyer has recently taken over LawZone (see below) which is linked to the home page

Subjective Rating (where 5 is excellent and 1 is poor and no rating indicate that that category has not been assessed)

Usefulness 4/5

Site design 4/5

Updating frequency 5/5

www.lawzone.co.uk

This service was until recently independent. It is now owned by the publishers of The Lawyer. It describes itself as the “online law community” and works by providing a welter of breaking news on all sorts of legal issues. Anyone can register for free newsletters on topics of their choice. These come by e-mail usually with links to more details about the stories.  Archives are accessible from the home page although information is not always easy to track down. Since changing hands, the service seems to have suffered a little in terms of frequency and quantity of updates. One hopes that this is only a temporary feature.

Usefulness 4/5

Site design 2/5

Updating frequency 3/5

www.legalweekglobal.net

If it is international legal news that you are after, try this site, a free one but relatively free of advertising.  The scale of its coverage means that only the biggest stories are covered and not in that much detail. It also tends to be weighted more towards news about lawyers and their firms than news about the law: but that’s useful too I suppose. It has a free e-mail service regarding vacancies (careful which address you use…) and an e-mail daily news feed, also free.

Usefulness 2/5

Site design 4/5

Updating frequency 3/5

www.legalday.co.uk

Billed as “everyday news and links for UK law”, it does what is says on the homepage. Eschewing any type of fancy layout, the front page packs in five columns of daily legal news under the headings: What’s reporting; Cases and Issues; Business; Practice News and International. Below that one finds the archive for the week and below that the archives for the whole of the year. Each story is referenced to the source. Pleasingly many of the stories are linked to more two or more web sources.  A really clever feature is entitled “Current Issues”. There are well over a hundred of them (such as Iraq Construction, Spam, Roe v Wade etc.). Clicking on the subject brings up a five-column page with headings of Newsarchive, Legal Commentary, Cases, Documents and Resources. In short, a fully hyperlinked, starter for 10, to loads of current topics. Great idea.

Usefulness 5/5

Site design 4/5

Updating frequency 5/5