When it launches to the public later this year, Wigster will become the first genuine price comparison website in the UK. Prices for a broad range of worktypes will be displayed instantly on submission of an enquiry, along with other key information including service differentiators, location/distance to details and performance star ratings.

Wigster’s Nick Miller explains: “What sets this site apart from those that have gone before is that we have approached this very much from the consumer’s perspective. Thanks to the rapidly maturing insurance comparison website market, consumers now have certain expectations of comparison websites – and Wigster is the first in the legal space to bring together all the information that allows for immediate and comprehensive evaluation of the competing offerings.

Equally important is the fact that we are committed to building a brand, not just a website. To generate consistently large volumes of referrals for our member law firms, Wigster has to become the ‘go to’ website for the public, a Compare the Market or Go Compare for legal, if you like. To get to those required levels, to achieve a comparable degree of recognition takes significant and sustained investment – we’re the first site where national advertising across TV, radio and the internet will spearhead the promotional effort.”

Nick Miller is keen for law firms to put aside any cynicism they might have about the comparison concept and to look positively at what Wigster has to offer in terms of new revenue streams.

He continues: ‘ I can understand the doubt and negativity that has crept in over the years, what with a slew of websites launching in a blaze of glory and then petering out – taking any promised revenue increases with them. But that’s exactly the market picture that encouraged us to develop Wigster, in the belief that no-one had as yet got the proposition100% right. For us, getting it to 100% was dependent on two things: first giving consumers a brand that they recognise and trust, and then giving them the means to make truly instant and informed price comparisons.

All our planning and back-end development work has been predicated on those two aims. Today they are our two clear USPs and I’d like law firms to see that here is a brand new and much improved shop window for them to show themselves off in. Having opted for a high volume, low referral fee business model, our success is directly aligned with that of our members’ – while everyone’s success is dependent on giving the consumer the best possible comparison experience. I’m confident that Wigster will set new standards in this respect and become a major contributor to law firm revenues as a result.”

For more information on membership or to register, firms should contact Wigster on 0844 247 7700 or email info@wigster.com.

The company began a dedicated compliance project in the New Year, appointing support analyst Stephen Peak to head up the initiative internally. Consultants provided a gap analysis and Stephen then developed and drove through the programme to its successful conclusion. e-know.net was assessed in mid-July, demonstrating conformance with over 100 separate controls relevant to the delivery of hosted managed services; these ranged from the physical protection of the building to network security, from document shredding to the marketing approvals process.

The certification lasts for three years during which time e-know.net will be subject to six monthly surveillance audits to ensure continued compliance.

Commenting on the award of ISO27001, Nigel Redwood, e-know.net’s managing director, said: “We are naturally delighted to have been awarded accreditation for our ISMS – it is the defining quality mark particularly for those companies entrusted with customer data.  While stringent procedures as regards data protection and security have long been embedded in the organisation, it provides extra reassurance to clients that these have now been validated by a tough ISO standard.”

Any law firm can now sign up to road-test Microsoft OCS, which is hosted and managed by InTechnology and delivered on a pay-as-you-use utility basis. The trial allows for up to 10 users to assess the software for a month, and can easily be extended for those keen to move to wider, more formal pilot projects.  Features up for evaluation include instant messaging, ‘presence’ based communication, real-time document sharing, and desktop video calling and conferencing.

Trials can be up and running in just 48 hours with no disruption to existing network services, capitalising on the hosted platform’s rapid deployment capability.

InTechnology estimates that OCS adopters could realise a 50% saving in unwanted or superfluous email and voice messages, greatly reducing communication latency and dramatically accelerating the decision-making process. Through greater utilisation of video calling, lawyers could claim back up to 11 days that would otherwise be spent travelling on business – as well as save their firms the associated travel and environmental costs.

Richard Quine, InTechnology’s divisional director, voice and unified communications, comments: “OCS may well be game-changing technology but few organisations currently have the appetite for a major software roll-out with the inevitable investment that that entails. With a comparable DIY trial in-house costing a firm a minimum of £50,000 this is the perfect alternative – a genuine no-cost, no risk way of ‘sucking and seeing’. If you don’t like it, you can just walk away but if you do, and it makes an obvious impact, then you have yourself the beginnings of a sound business case for adoption.”

For more information, please visit http://www.intechnology.co.uk/hosteduc

Chris, a former partner at regional firm Martin Kaye, will draw on a dozen years at the management coalface and nearly three decades of wider law firm experience to help small-to-medium sized firms meet some of today’s key business challenges: from formulating strategies for growth to responding to the Legal Services Act, from coping with the increasing regulatory and compliance burden to leveraging IT systems and workflow.

Advice and practical assistance around outsourcing and managed IT services will be one of the Cann Consultancy’s lead offerings. In his role as Martin Kaye’s IT head, Chris pioneered the adoption of managed services back in 2000 and gave the sector an early lesson in what could be achieved: by completely outsourcing the firm’s core infrastructure to an IT specialist, he created a scalable, resilient, cost-efficient IT platform on which to build the business whilst also freeing up internal resource to focus on long-term projects for the benefit of both clients and staff.

IT consulting services will revolve around system audits and cost analyses; the development of the business case for alternative IT delivery models; procurement, including the drawing up of tenders and the evaluation of suppliers; the drafting of contracts and Service Level Agreements; and project management.

Risk and compliance are increasingly linked to systems and automation and again, drawing directly on his experience of creating procedural frameworks and workflows, and the technology to support them, Chris will look to advise firms on how to marry the two for effective risk management.

Keen to offer added-value and the prospect of a ‘quick win’ for clients, he has introduced a fixed-price risk audit package – a site visit, interviews, and system and document review prefacing a gap analysis report for any business wanting to measure itself against the Code of Conduct 2007 and/or Lexcel standards.

Commenting on his new venture Chris Cann said: “I’m not the first consultant to come into this sector and I’m sure I won’t be the last but I think I’m probably one of very few with the years – and the knocks! – under my belt that allow me to fully empathise with my target market. And it’s because I’ve been there myself that I’m taking a deliberately pragmatic approach, one that’s rooted in the realities of today’s legal business and is focused squarely on getting things done and moving firms forward.’

For more information on the Cann Consultancy, please visit www.cannconsultancy.co.uk

For managing director Nicholas Child, the development was a logical one. “Having been in Hong Kong for the past nine years, we’ve been able to take advantage of the opening up of the Chinese market but we’ve reached a tipping point now that says we have to service it with a dedicated team and country presence.

There is simply huge potential to be tapped and with our fully Unicode compliant system, we’re seeing interest not just from international law firms coming into the region but more importantly, from the Chinese law firms themselves. But to succeed there we know we have to respect the country and the culture; that means a local office, with local people, local support, a native ‘on the ground’ resource that fully understands the commercial environment and client mindset.”

For more information http://www.intechnology.co.uk/HostedUC #ocs #ucoms.

Incterim will see Legal Inc consultants made available on short, medium or long-term secondments, enabling law firms to scale up teams with temporary staff who have specific litigation expertise and coal-face experience.

As Lisa Burton, co-founder of Legal Inc, explains, adequately resourcing caseloads when demands can flex so alarmingly is not as straightforward as it seems:

“The feedback we received from litigation support managers was that they all need outside help at some time or another, and not just extra lit support bodies but also increasingly IT consultants, workflow engineers and project managers. They were finding that going through mainstream recruitment agencies was not always satisfactory.

Common problems included people having the requisite skills but not the relevant experience within the litigation environment, which made for protracted learning curves and time-consuming supervision. And then there was finding the skills in the first place: identifying useful generalists at one end of the spectrum or essential specialists at the other was taking time and effort they could ill afford to spare.

As one of the UK’s most respected litigation support and technology consultancies, we have built our business on bringing together both legal and technical talent, immersing them within this unique arena and deploying them at the legal coal-face.  We’re looking to supplement teams with seasoned practitioners, who understand the drivers and dynamics of litigation, who know every aspect of the EDRM working model, who have proven track records in their own particular subjects, and who can bring immediate value to any project needing extra resources. No protracted learning curve, no hand holding, no knowledge gaps, no process flaws, no management weaknesses.”

Key skills and roles covered include:

•    IT systems architecture, infrastructure and security consultancy
•    ‘Best of breed’ litigation support and other COTS application advice, consultancy
•    Litigation systems and IT support
•    Consultancy and advice on secure data collection
•    Data and document preparation
•    Capture of data (coding)
•    Electronic data pre-processing, processing
•    Early case assessment
•    Review
•    Production
•    Disclosure
•    eCourt solutions, electronic presentation

For more information on Incterim, then please contact Lisa Burton | lisa.burton@legalinc.co.uk

InTechnology’s hosted OCS solution, together with its Unity IP Voice product, is leading the way in the ‘Unified Communications’ revolution. Desktop tools such as presence, video calling, document sharing, group Instant Messaging and conferencing have the potential to accelerate decision-making, increase output, simplify collaboration, improve user engagement, reduce travel and boost green credentials while slashing communication and associated costs by up to 50%.

The service requires no upfront investment and can be deployed in as little as 24 hours; and with 24x7x365 support and no extended tie-ins, firms can trial the technology with confidence and without risk.

For more information call 0800 9832522 or email: hosteduc@intechnology.com

‘The benefits of Unified Communications for law firms’ looks at what can be achieved through integrating IP telephony and Microsoft OCS and making it available on a hosted platform, and the specific advantages accruing to the legal user.

http://www.intechnology.co.uk/Documents/Podcasts/07_The_Grid_Unified-Communications-Legal-Sector.mp3

This new Software-as-a-Service offering allows small and mid-sized law firms to easily adopt a next-generation practice management platform, without the need to incur additional capital expenditure to implement the solution or undertake ongoing administration, maintenance and upgrade costs to use the solution.Law firms adopting LexisNexis Managed Services benefit from secure, flexible and cost-effective access to a modern practice management platform that not only facilitates improved organisational performance, but also delivers business continuity and disaster recovery. The per user, per month subscription model means that customers can easily scale the solution up or down based on changing business requirements. As the management of LexisNexis Axxia dna is outsourced, customers’ IT departments minimise overhead costs and free up valuable time to focus on other strategic technology projects within their firms.

LexisNexis Managed Services is provisioned through a preferred alliance with e-know.net Limited (www.e-know.net), a managed services and hosting solutions provider with an unrivalled track record in the UK legal sector. e-know.net has an enterprise-level, state-of-the-art data centre and employs legally qualified support staff to help address customer issues and needs.

“We worked closely with LexisNexis Axxia dna customers to develop an enterprise-class hosted solution that offers cost-effective, functionally rich and customisable technology. The solution can be tailored to customers’ individual business needs, whether they pertain to the types of applications they require, disaster recovery, data security or other factors,” said Tim Cheadle, General Manager, LexisNexis UK Enterprise Solutions. “The combination of our extensive legal sector expertise and e-know.net’s successful track record of providing hosted solutions to this market makes LexisNexis Managed Services a compelling proposition. Furthermore, we intend to gradually expand this offering to include other LexisNexis products.”

To make it easy for customers to deploy LexisNexis Axxia dna, LexisNexis Managed Services hosts their current practice management system with e-know.net whilst simultaneously migrating to the new solution to minimise business disruption. In addition, with the latest LexisNexis Axxia dna releases and upgrades made immediately available to LexisNexis Managed Services customers, they can always have the most up-to-date integrated practice management system underpinning their business.LexisNexis Managed Services also offers LexisNexis Axxia dna customers the opportunity to host applications such as LexisNexis ® InterAction, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, VoIP and document management.

“This alliance is an exciting opportunity for both organisations. This formal arrangement will allow us to offer LexisNexis Axxia dna both as an ‘out of the box’ as well as managed bespoke solution, which will greatly benefit our customers. We have more experience in providing hosted solutions to the legal sector than any other service provider. Similarly, LexisNexis’ market penetration today in the UK legal market is unequalled. This collaboration is a logical step for both parties,” added Nigel Redwood, Managing Director at e-know.net. LexisNexis Axxia dna is a next-generation, fully-integrated practice management software designed to increase firms’ efficiency and profitability with legal accounting, time and billing, workflow, document and contact management in one integrated system.