Anyone who has endured the trauma of moving house will applaud Click Conveyancing, recently named “online service of the year” at the Legal Technology Awards 2007 (www.clickconveyancing.co.uk and www.legaltechnologyawards.co.uk). The service is offered by Barnetts Solicitors, a firm that seems committed to demystifying land law, deploying technology to save costs, and communicating electronically with clients. Text messages are sent at key stages during transactions and clients are able to track progress, at any hour, on their website. An online jargon-buster and quote calculator are there too. Highly commended in the same category of award was salt? Enterprise, the latest version of an online compliance product developed by the veteran legal technology pioneers in Australia, Blake Dawson Waldron (http://compliance.bdw.com). salt? Enterprise provides online legal awareness training, helping users to understand legal duties that apply to their businesses and keeping them informed of relevant legal developments. Available modules include money laundering, insider trading and health and safety.

Pensions lawyers should be interested in Compact Analysis, a new online service that compares actuarial valuations of pension schemes (www.compactanalysis.com). The 21st century has been tricky so far for companies with pension schemes. Most suffer from serious deficits. More challenging still, employers can no longer limit their contributions to what they claim they can afford — the Pensions Regulator is ready to intervene under the Pensions Act 2004, legislation that is starting to bite. Compact Analysis is a tool for benchmarking the valuations of pension schemes and, in turn, for managing risks. It enables trustees and employers, before they finalise their valuations, to determine how their own scheme’s funding decisions will compare with the market. In this way, they are forewarned of funding plans that are likely to trigger the concern of the regulator or to leave trustees exposed to negligence claims. In the shadow of these threats, the pensions industry, so often in the spotlight, would be well-advised to support this initiative.

The printed page is not yet dead. Unlike online resources, traditional articles and books are reassuringly finite. You know where you stand with print. The end is always in sight. Contents and index pages provide clear signposts and, although footnotes and bibliographies may send you scurrying for more, at least the original source is clearly bounded. Browsing the Web, even in authoritative and well-conceived sites, is generally a more open-ended business. The numerous links and the essential interconnectedness often give users a sense of a job never finished (despite the witty end-of-internet page at www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm). It is not unusual to feel lost in cyberspace. After all, there are billions of pages out there; and this at a time when, sadly, people seem to have less time in life to devote to reading. Two key lessons emerge for website providers. First, a small number of relevant links on a website is greatly preferable to a sea of links of questionable significance. Secondly, brief, punchy contributions are invariably superior to long, wide-ranging treatises. Of course, it takes longer to be concise, as famously observed by Blaise Pascal: the French philosopher and mathematician apologised for writing a long letter because he did not have the time to make it shorter.

The author lectures and consults internationally. He is IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice and Honorary Professor at Gresham College. Contact: www.susskind.com

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