Many of you will be aware that my web designer and I are in the process of developing a new Landlord Law site.

The current site was originally developed by my web designer Gill Bishop in 2001, and although it has served me very well, it is getting a bit old and clunky.  We have been talking about a new site for a couple of years now.  Earlier this year I decided that the time had come to do it, and asked Gill to go ahead.

Gill advised that the new site should be built using the open source software Drupal, as this is a very stable platform suitable for a large site with many users (it’s the software used apparently for the White House website).  So this is what we are doing. The basic site is now there and Gill and I are both working on it.  It is taking us quite a bit longer than we originally thought.

Gill has done a stunning new theme for the site, which I am really pleased with.  However the theme is the least of it.  She has to create various types of membership (and get them to work), lots of new templates for the different type of content (Q and A, FAQ, tips etc), and the new purchasing system, not to mention a mailing system and forums and the new tenancy agreements service.  To name but a few.

I have the massive task of reviewing and then copying over ALL the Landlord Law content.  We have taken the decision to split the site in half, so members are going to be either landlord members or tenant members.  This is good, in that it will allow me to focus more on the different needs of those groups.

However it also means that for much of the content, for example the articles, which were generally written with both landlords and tenants in mind, I now have to do two, a landlords’ version and a tenants’ version.  This is taking some time.

While doing this of course I am also having to learn Drupal on the hoof.  It’s a steep learning curve and it was a bit hard at first.  However I am getting the hang of it, with help from Gill, the Drupal  guidance, and a couple of books I bought from Packt.

Drupal is a fantastic system.  We are using something called taxonomy, by which all content is tagged with a term.  I can then, using a thing called ‘views’, create a page, which will show all of a certain type of content, with a certain term.

So for example I have had to do views for all the different types of FAQ – so there is a page for the landlords tenancy agreements FAQ, a page for the landlords tenancy deposits FAQ, etc, all linked from a page which has links to the links pages for all the landlords FAQ (if you follow me).  And the same for the tenants FAQ.  These all have to be done individually and it took me a couple of days to get it right (although we have a clone function which helps a lot).

I am hoping to be able to do something similar for the Q and A, which I know will please many of you, as you have often asked for a better way to search these.

There’s still a vast amount to do.  Probably about one half to two thirds of the content is still to be moved over, plus there is some new content I want to do.

There is also the presentation of the information on the page.  I want to have at least one picture on most pages, plus there are things called blocks which we can use to put information in the margins.  This is all replicating a lot of what we have on the current site, but it all has to be done in a different way.

Last night I started putting links into the ‘library’, which will be a resource of links to relevant web-sites.  Things I have not really got around to doing much about yet are the new suppliers area, the forums, the trails, and the new instruction procedure for ‘one to one’ case work.

Not to mention the new software we are going to be using for our tenancy agreements!

So it will be a while longer before we can launch.  We are coming along, but I suspect it will be a couple of months more yet.  But it will be a pretty nice system when it is done.

If you have any suggestions for content, do leave a comment and let me know.

For a long time Nick Holmes together with quite a large number of people from the legal profession have been developing an online source of free legal information, termed the Free Legal Web.  Excitingly they have now launched a new pilot housing law site.

The housing law project

This draws on a number of sources, in particular articles drawn from the Nearly Legal blog, some introductory guides from William Flack (who also has his own excellent William Flack Blog, and who is developing a Social Welfare Law Wiki), and articles from the brilliant Pain Smith Blog.  As well as not a few articles from your very own Landlord Law Blog by yours truly.

So although I hope you will continue to follow this blog, if you need more housing law guidance, the Free Legal Web is a good place to go.

Criminal law and more

However the Free Legal Web is not just for housing law.  There is a also now a Criminal law channel, and no doubt other areas of law will follow.  In the words on the site:

FreeLegalWeb is a collaborative project which will provide intuitive, joined-up, public access to the law and legal guidance

If you are interested in the law, take a look.  If you are a lawyer yourself, why not join in?  It is an exciting project.

I have gradually found myself using the toolbar.  But I found I wanted more.  I wanted links to the courts, to BAILII, to the Statute Law database, to all the sites I use professionally.  I have all these links of course in bookmarks.  However where they are varies, depending on whether I am using the PC or the Macbook, and whether I am using Safari, Firefox of IE.  “It would be nice” I thought to myself, “to have a toolbar which I could have on all of these where the position of the links can be the same”.  ” And “, I thought, “perhaps it might also be useful to other practitioenrs”.

After contacting Conduit.com who provide the free online software, and having been assured that it is all right for me to have two toolbars, I put it together this evening. It has a number of different sections, as follows:

Landlord Law Links.  After all it is *my* toolbar, and I do need to have easy access to the various parts of my site.

Law.  This has links to the statute law database and my Landlord Law legislation links section.

Cases.  This has links to several sites, BAILII of course, Lawindexpro, Nearly Legal (as it is more of less a case reporting service now), Arden Chambers eflashes, House of Lords, Supreme Court

Courts. The HM Court Service site, the Residential Property Tribunal, and the Supreme Court (again)

Gov’t.  This has just the CPR and the Communities and Local Government housing section, at present.

Web. Useful web-sites such as Delia Venables links pages, Infolaw, Garden Law.

Blogs.  This one, Nearly Legal (again), Pain Smith, and a few others.  I have limited the list to blogs dealing mostly with housing rather than pure property law, althugh I have included my Solicitors blog at the end (well after all it is my toolbar …)

Press.  Just the Times Law section and Inside Housing at the moment, but I expect I will add to this soon.

NFP (not for profit).  This has Shelter and the CAB at present.

Lawyers.  This has useful pracitioners sites, currently Gary Webbers’ UK Property site, Nic Madge’s site and Garden Court Chambers’ housing legal resources page.

Messages – see below.

As indicated above, this is a bit of a work in progress, and I hope to add to the toolbar as and when I find (or remember) other sites.

If you would like the toolbar for your own computer, you are welcome to download it.  >> You can do this here.  I have set the link to open in a new window.  The procedure for downloading the toolbar is explained >> in my earlier post, so I suggest you go there next and read how to do it.  It is very simple (make sure you use the download page linked from here though, its the one called the Housing Advisor Community Toolbar).

Note that I have added a message box to the end of the toolbar.  This is so, if I decide to add a link, I can put a message up for anyone using it, to tell them what I have done.  If this is you, you can reply to this, perhaps to suggest another site.  I think you can also just use it to send me a message, but we won’t find out really how it works until we use it.

I hope a few of you do decide to use it.  It could become a collaborative effort.  Although my word is final.  It is after all *my* toolbar!

Lawyers and clients (from any country – it is an international site) can both register on the site free of charge. Both appear as anonymous, although lawyers are rated on the basis of client feedback. Clients can load up details of their case and then lawyers and client can discuss the case before the client chooses a firm to act. At that stage the lawyer pays a modest fee to the site (£50 or £150 for PI cases).

As it is free of charge, all lawyers should register. There is nothing to lose and they may gain some lucrative work.

I have just listened to an interesting webcast of an interview of Richard Susskind here. Susskind is promoting his new book, The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the nature of legal services, having written several groundbreaking books on the use of IT and technology in the internet in the past.

Susskind covers quite a wide range of legal IT related topics in the interview, but it is some of the comments at the end which are most worrying (for lawyers). Both he and his interviewer make the point that lawyers are not (on the whole) natural innovators and tend to be resistant to new developments, particularly if they are making a good income as they are.

However he believes (and I have to say that I agree with him) that technology and the internet will have huge implications for the profession, and it is worrying that the Law Society and the government are planning new rules and regulations for the future of the profession, without really taking these properly into account.

For example one thing he mentioned was shared knowledge on forums and how this may develop in the future. In fact however this is happening right now, as there are a number of consumer forums where people exchange information about legal matters, for example this forum here on tenancy deposits. Shared knowledge of this kind could well reduce the need to use qualified lawyers in the future.

The conclusion, more or less, was that there will always be a place for some lawyers and the subject is an interesting discipline in itself, but that the profession has probably passed its high point and things will never be the same again. He also made the point that new lawyers are entering an uncertain profession and many law students should be prepared to use their law degree for something other than practising as a lawyer.