Puppies from cyberspace

Sometimes the biggest decisions can be made in a short space of time. Equally, small decisions can leave you fretting, waking up in the middle of the night and not knowing what to do. In this case we were revamping our website.

What to put on it? We managed to make the big decisions easily, but a dispute has been raging as to whether we should include Cosmo the dog on the homepage. Is this going to scare away people with a phobia or an allergy to dogs? Or does it show people we have a caring office environment which gives children something to play with?

And this opens up the debate on what is appropriate for the website. After a quick trawl through 20 or 30 websites you can see most solicitors' sites are frighteningly similar. Many are no more than a brochure on the internet and most are deadly dull and uninviting.

Updating and downloading

For some time we have only put up pictures of our solicitors on the website. We now think it might be nice for clients to see who their first point of contact is '“ Jackie our receptionist who has been with us for 17 years. We also have a Polish speaking trainee legal executive and we thought it would be nice for the Polish clients to see a picture of her. But should we extend this to trainee solicitors, secretarial staff and paralegals? It is certainly good for the clients to know who it is they are speaking to.

There are firms that allow clients to download legal documents and perhaps customise them. It won't be long before the basic solicitors' website becomes much more than a brochure and develops into a resource where, if you want to make a will, for example, you can populate a questionnaire and print something off for signature. Soon you will probably be able to put in details of a property you intend to purchase and do the whole wretched business online without seeinga solicitor. What the SRA will think about that I don't know but I cannot believe the present outdated system of conveyancing is likely to be around for much longer.

However, if we did put up content that customers could download and adapt, I suspect our indemnity insurers might have something to say about it. I'm sure developments of this sort are still in their infancy, and, while there will be dramatic changes over the next five to ten years, I don't think I can justify an internet solution to all my clients' problems just yet.

But we do put on a lot of content which is of interest to clients, including up-to-date news and a library of articles on a wide range of subjects which clients can browse through for free. Again it probably won't be long before websites give clients direct access to databases such as Lawtel and LexisNexis.

Gatekeepers and problem solvers

This should not be seen as a direct threat to the profession but will signal a change in our function. We will be increasingly seen as gatekeepers to knowledge and the websites developed by solicitors in the future are going to be much more process-orientated and designed to resolve problems rather than just cry the praises of individual solicitors.

As legal websites become more practical and functional there will be increasing pressure to have sites that appear at the top of Google listings and this in turn will pressurise legal professionals to merge as smaller firms will simply be unable to compete. I already pay a fortune to Google to prioritise my listings and as the legal profession morphs into something quite different over the next few years other firms much larger than mine will be paying even more to prioritise their listings so the customer can access them first ahead of the opposition.

Of course all of this presupposes we will still be using computers in ten years' time. Maybe we will have stopped using traditional desktops and have a new type of technology. Will that technology be based on the iPhone/Blackberry or something more radical and advanced? We are embarking on the biggest industrial revolution in legal services that the profession has ever seen and such advances are likely to come into effect very soon.

Will we be looking at the death of the solicitors' office? Will we be looking at clients remotely accessing their solicitor via digital technology? All of these developments will make for extremely profound and in some cases worrying changes to the way we perceive our website, but the real difficulty is whether we put our dog on our homepage. I think a picture of Cosmo will bring the customers in. I'll keep you posted.

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