AN ELECTRONIC calendar for monitoring new legislation has been launched by Lawtel (www.lawtel.com). It enables lawyers to track the progress and status of Bills, statutes and statutory instruments as they pass through Parliament and to be notified automatically when sections of a given Act come into force.

The service synchronises with the calendar feature within Microsoft Outlook so that notifications can appear in lawyers’ diaries. Each calendar entry can be customised with alarms, notes and attachments and has direct links to the actual source materials within Lawtel. The service can be tailored so lawyers are alerted only to those legislative changes that affect their practice areas. A similar calendar for EU developments is also offered.

LAWTEL is a service of Sweet & Maxwell, the UK-based publisher owned by the Thomson Corporation (www.thomson.com). Like its arch-rival the LexisNexis Group (www.lexisnexis.com), Thomson is on the acquisition trail and continuing to diversify in the legal technology market. In 2003 Thomson bought Elite, a leading provider of legal practice management software (www.elite.com), while early this year it announced the acquisition of Hildebrandt International, management and technology consultants that specialise in law firms (www.hildebrandt.com). Meanwhile, in late 2004 LexisNexis (the global legal publishing arm of Reed Elsevier), acquired Interface Software, the developers of InterAction, the popular client relationship management system (www.interfacesoftware.com). And, more recently, LexisNexis has begun a credible campaign to bring e-filing (submission of documents electronically) to the UK courts.

THE hunger and rivalry of Thomson and LexisNexis is fascinating to behold. Each is a multibillion-dollar corporation that has enjoyed great success in conventional and electronic legal publishing. Each is able to deliver secure, robust, large-scale systems, underpinned by formidable research and development capabilities. It is clear that both have aspirations to dominate beyond legal content in broader areas of legal technology. Ultimately, this is an arms race that should benefit the legal world as the giants drive one another in search of new perfections. Fears of an emerging duopoly that will limit choice are probably unfounded, not least because there are already other ambitious and considerable players in or joining the fray — such as Microsoft, Bloomberg and SAP. At the same time, smaller niche players with distinctive offerings should still survive.

ONE option for the niche provider is to collaborate periodically with larger companies. This was the course adopted recently by WordWave, a privately held company (www.wordwave.com). Best known in England as court reporters for the Crown Court, WordWave worked with Sky News in broadcasting on television, for the first time, the live transcript of a judicial hearing. The case was the Osnabruck court martial involving the British soldiers accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners. Using advanced transcription technology, the keystrokes of the stenographer in the courtroom were converted, almost in real-time, into the rolling transcript. This was transmitted wirelessly to Sky News and from there broadcast to viewers.

The author lectures and consults internationally. He is IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice and can be contacted through www.susskind.com

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