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About our Company
As more and more legislative, case and hearing information is created, stored and delivered in electronic format, the
ability to search, access and exchange this data across networks will have increasing impact upon your efficacy as a Lawyer.
This ability is heavily influenced by the reliability and security of the technologies and services employed by your
practice. Whereas time, care and of course money, can be spent on creating fast, safe and efficient networks within
your office or home, you have little or no control over the reliability or security of the technologies used by
Internet Service Providers. Any network is only as strong as its weakest point and this can often be the ISP,
especially if it has little knowledge of the specific business needs of its customers.
The goal of most commercial ISPs is to make the minimum use of their manual or technical resources. This can result
in high speeds, often used to demonstrate good performance, but many do so at a cost to the quality of their service
e.g.
- Call centre staff with support scripts are cheaper than real technicians.
- Email uses less bandwidth and space on a mail server when certain types of attachment are blocked or limited.
- Transferring mail with low or no encryption levels uses less technical resources to process.
Lawyers Online Ltd is the Internet Service provider dedicated to the legal profession. Our business is to recommend
specify and provide suitably secure & effective methods of communication over the Internet.
A brief history can reveal a lot about our true worth to the legal profession. Our founder, a Sole Practitioner specialising in group-litigations, at one point employed 4 times
more support staff than fee-earners, permanently occupied with creating, sending, receiving and collating large
numbers of mail and fax documents. Paying particular attention to the then recently published "Woolf reforms," it was
apparent that careful use of email and the web could streamline these multi-party communications considerably. Having
brought in the technical expertise to create a system of distributing the highly sensitive case information quickly,
safely and cost effectively, the stunning discovery that only 3 of the 136 firms in the group had access to the
Internet soon proved it wasn't going to be a case of utilising existing resources within firms. The fact that
commercial ISPs couldn't provide the necessary levels of support to bring these solicitors firms up to speed,
mid-litigation, raised the stakes still further. It became evident that the best way to support these many and varied
firms in getting online, was to have direct accountability for their connections and mail delivery, thus cancelling
out the unknown "middlemen", along with the myriad potential obstacles, both perceived and real. This was achieved by
building hybrid web and mail services into bespoke servers, hosted at key sites acknowledged as the best performing
in UK's Internet infrastructure.
Through sound technical expertise and knowledge of our customers business, Lawyers Online Ltd has evolved into a
specialist ISP to the Legal Profession as a whole. In October 1998 the Law Society distributed 84000 CD-ROMs
providing the software to set-up and go online with free Lawyers Online Internet Connection & Mail accounts. We
remain fully committed to helping members of the legal profession to grasp the opportunities offered by these times
of advancement and reform (not always the same thing).
Reasons to Use Lawyers Online Ltd
When servers communicate with each other over the Internet they first do so with no encryption, through a series of
handshake procedures (taking only milliseconds) the two servers then establish the highest level of security they
share, and precede to communicate at that level. All our servers are configured to use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer),
which through TLS (Transport Layer Security) enables our members to send and receive email at high levels of
encryption.
The size of our chosen market is finite; Existing resources are such that we can comfortably provide bespoke services
to every Solicitor, Barrister and Legal Executive in the UK simultaneously. Non specialist ISPs have no such luxury,
thus speed and reliability will fluctuate as millions of users with varying requirements contend with each other for
limited connections, bandwidth and support.
We design & build all our own servers. These are hosted at high performance sites on the Uk Internet Infrastructure.
As we are not tied to bandwidth providers, they can be moved in response to network performance, availability and
cost issues. Many ISPs own or lease the use of generic hardware and software and due to relatively large bandwidth
requirements, are often tied into long-term contracts. Thus their services can be difficult to differentiate or
tailor to specific requirements, and unresponsive to short-term factors impacting connectivity.
Packages are available but are there as guides rather than constraints. Why queue for "off the shelf" products when
you can arrange bespoke within minutes?
Organisations and Affiliates
Lawyers Online is a member of the following organisations:
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