THE British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) has just celebrated its fifth birthday (www.bailii.org). Run as a modestly funded charity, BAILII provides the largest, free-of-charge online collection of British and Irish primary legal materials (legislation and case law). The service now covers seven jurisdictions and holds 400,000 searchable documents with about 15 million internal hypertext links. The links are vital, enabling users to jump, for example, from law reports into specific sections of legislation. BAILII deploys Australian technology contributed originally by AustLII (www.austlii.org), an institute that has also championed the remarkable WorldLII (www.worldlii.org). The latter’s mission is to offer free and independent access to the law of many legal systems (currently, 55 jurisdictions). Underpinning these services is the conviction — encapsulated in the slogan “free the law” — that legal materials should be directly accessible to all citizens at no cost to them. This principle is now clearly support by the British Government (www.hmso.gov.uk). It is manifestly no longer the case, as Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher, legal and social reformer, feared of the law in the 19th century, that “where nobody publishes, nobody cares”.

LAWYERS who have been excited about Wi-Fi will be ecstatic about WiMAX (www.wimaxforum.org). Wi-Fi is the technology that enables mobile workers to connect to the internet, wirelessly and at high speed, in coffee shops, hotels and airports. They do so through access points known as hot spots. The main problem with Wi-Fi is that users need to be within about 50 metres of the hot spots. Enter WiMAX. This also promises wireless broadband access but within a range of ten miles and perhaps more. A law firm in Central London with WiMAX, as currently envisaged, could therefore provide its road warriors with fast mobile access anywhere in the City (in taxis, the courts, at clients). WiMAX could also bring internet access to many homes that are unlikely otherwise to be cabled for fast connections. The WiMAX standard has strong backing among wireless providers and is also supported by Intel, the giant chip manufacturer (www.intel.com/netcomms/technologies/wimax). WiMAX should be widely available in 2007.

The author lectures and consults internationally (his clients include Deloitte). He is IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice and can be contacted through www.susskind.com

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