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"We had a good look a couple of months ago and decided against it until it is a little more developed," said the marketing manager at one of the firms. "We couldn't really see the benefit for clients and were a little nervous about being seen to be going on for the sake of it."

Andrew Mills, a partner in the IP and technology group at Freeth Cartwright in Nottingham - the other firm that had been considering opening a virtual office - said there were several reasons against entering Second Life: the grapics were "shoddy and slow"; it conflicted with the firm's internet firewall; and it would have been expensive to run.

"To have an online presence we'd need to allocate someone to be on Second Life as our representative nine to five, Monday to Friday," Mr Mills said. "Without any obvious way to cover the cost of that, it's a very expensive luxury."

Mr Mills also said that business opportunities seemed limited. "Linden Labs [the software company that developed Second Life] enforce IP rights within the world, taking one of our obvious roles away from us," he said.

But while Freeth Cartwright decided against participating in Second Life, it has enthusiastically integrated other emerging internet technologies into its practice. The firm runs a weblog for clients; its lawyers communicate using Skype, the internet telephone service; and Mr Mills and several partners are currently using a Wiki to co-edit a book on social networking for lawyers. The firm is also sponsoring the first annual conference of legal bloggers in the UK, LawBlog 2007, on May 18.

Mr Mills himself is a member of various social networking sites, including LinkedIn, the business networking site with more than 10 million members that has been likened to MySpace for professional adults. "I've been on the system for quite a long time and think it's very good," he said. "It does set the benchmark for online business networking."

Many of the UK lawyers registered on LinkedIn, however, practice in the technology and intellectual property fields, and it remains to be seen whether their less technologically-aware colleagues in other sectors will embrace social networking so eagerly.

John Williams, head of corporate at Beachcroft Wainsbroughs in Bristol, who joined LinkedIn as part of an executive MBA course at the London Business School, said he was sceptical as to whether it would be useful for UK lawyers.

"In terms of legal networking I have not really used it as a tool," he said, "not least because it is a fairly narrow band of people who are the gatekeepers to legal services and the normal marketing is 'inside out', through relationships. Like any network-based tool it rather depends on who the other users are. There are a lot of technology-sector early adopters in the system in my experience."

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