Vision on

An accessible site focusing on news affecting the legal profession in Scotland. Balanced coverage bringing you the facts behind the newspaper headlines. An easy way of retrieving those back issues of the Journal that you just didn’t have space to keep.

And a readily searchable library of Journal articles. (How often have you spent ages looking for one you remember seeing, that really could help you on a problem now, and it turns out to have been published longer ago than you thought?)

All this, and more, will be available from next month with the launch of the Journal website www.journalonline.co.uk – timed to coincide with publication of the October issue of the printed magazine. The Law Society of Scotland has provided funding for Connect Communications, who edit and produce the Journal under contract to the Society, to design and build a dedicated website – The Journal Online. Not merely an archive of Journal material, the site will offer you information and advice not otherwise published in the Journal, or perhaps anywhere else.

First, and crucially, the site will provide a news service. Updating daily, it will cover the significant stories affecting the profession as they happen – something a monthly printed title can never hope to do. Connect writers are compiling their own database of contacts to add to published sources in order to bring you the most relevant legal developments from the mass of daily news.

The site will also greatly enhance the Journal’s ability to bring you relevant and up to date articles across the range of legal practice. Very often copy has to be held from one issue to the next, or even turned away, simply because of lack of space. On the website there will be no such constraints and we hope that contributors, whether from the practising or academic fields, will be encouraged to send in articles in the knowledge that if they pass the Journal’s editorial scrutiny, they will be publicly available. Each month the printed Journal will carry a note of what’s been happening on the website – a means of checking whether useful articles have been posted that you may have missed.

Fully compliant with current disability access requirements, the site will be easy to log on to. No usernames or passwords will be needed. The URL www.journalonline.co.uk takes you straight to a home page that, while clearly setting out the site content, will also display brief summaries of the day’s leading news stories, links to the current issue of the printed Journal with highlights of the main featured articles, a link to a searchable file of the job vacancies published in the printed magazine – and a taster from a past article to tempt you into the library section of back issues. There will be links to and from the Society’s site www.lawscot.org.uk.

Another enhancement on the printed Journal will be the events diary. If you want to announce your faculty dinner, your roadshow visit or your sponsored seminars, this is the place to do it. The “downloads” button will enable you to view the printed magazine in pdf format (actual page images): this will replace the current facility on the Society’s website. And “submissions” links to article content or comment that has not been published in print.

Searching the site will be straightforward too. The home page contains a simple search box – typing in a word or phrase will call up a list of hits sorted by relevance, and if you get more than a manageable number you will be able to refine your search or confine it to part of the database. Alternatively you can use the “Library search” link to go straight to the search menus and define a more precise search.

While the Connect website development team and the Society’s representatives between them have done their best to create a user-friendly and easily searchable site, they will be looking to modify it if it is found in any way to fall short of the standards they have set themselves. They look forward to hearing user feedback and to building on the strengths of the work already done, creating a resource which will enhance the reputation of the Journal and indeed of the profession in Scotland.