HAYMARKET IN SHETLAND TIMES RE-RUN ?
Earlier this week the UK publisher Haymarket commenced legal action against Burmah Castrol, part of the BP Amoco group, after discovering the oil company had designed its Castrol web site in such a way that it appeared to carry content from Haymarket's whatcar.com and autosport.com web sites within a Castrol branded border.

According to the Financial Times newspaper, Haymarket allege Castrol's activities constitute a "calculated and blatant" infringement of its online intellectual property rights and are planning to claim damages for breach of copyright and passing off.

Although BP Amoco have yet to issue a response, the process Haymarket complains of is called "framing" (or deep hyperlinking) and takes advantage of the ease with which third-party content can be targeted and incorporated within a web browser page using frames. The legal issues surrounding this process were extensively aired during the "Shetland Times" dispute in 1996 (Shetland Times -v- Dr Jonathon Wills & Zetnews, 1 1997 SLT 669) when the Scottish Outer House of the Court of Session granted an interim interdict (or temporary injunction) preventing a rival online newspaper from framing the editorial content of the Shetland Times - and in so doing bypassing the Shetland Times' home page and banner advertising.

LSC RESPONDS TO QUALITY MARK CRITICISMS
The UK's Legal Services Commission has responded to our criticisms of its consultation paper on a proposed quality mark standard for web sites operated by law firms providing legal services under the auspices of the Community Legal Service scheme.

According to the LSC: "Providing a quality mark standard for web sites will give users the confidence that the organisations providing the information have achieved a basic minimum quality requirement. Any organisation that provides legal information or advice directly to the public may apply to be a member of the CLS whether they are privately or publicly funded. The proposed quality mark will therefore apply to both the CLS funded and private client work of an organisation that has met the relevant criteria.

"It is not compulsory for legal services to apply for a web site quality mark. The proposed requirement of achieving a 'seamless service' can be met simply by incorporating a hyperlink to the JustAsk! web site which contains the CLS directory".

The LSC also say the consultation paper is intended to address the issue of the distinction between legal 'information' and 'advice' when provided via the internet and go on to stress that this is only a consultation paper regarding the proposed requirements "to ensure the final framework commands general support".

The closing date for consultations is 28th February 2001 - responses should be sent to Peter Watson at the LSC (email: qualitymark@legalservices.gov.uk). The full text of the consultation paper can be found at www.legalservices.gov.uk

LERNOUT & HAUSPIE GETS SIX MONTH STAY OF EXECUTION
Troubled speech technology company Lernout & Hauspie has succeeded in its second court application for concordaat, the Belgian equivalent of the US Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection process, so that its assets are now protected from creditors until 30th June.

In an attempt to restore its fortunes L&H has also begun a major restructuring exercise and already announced plans to close down its Korean operations and scale back its Singapore unit. Although these moves will see 1200 job losses, about 20 percent of the total payroll, L&H has warned that it expects to continue making losses until 2002. L&H also is also obliged by the Belgian court order to convene an extraordinary shareholders' meeting by 1st March to review its position.

Elsewhere within the L&H saga, a Belgian judge has ordered that Pol Hauspie, the co-founder and former chairman of the company, be investigated for possible money laundering. Lawyers acting for Mr Hauspie have declined to comment on the allegations but have promised full cooperation with the authorities. And, L&H had admitted that it is "struggling" with the integration of the speech recognition software developer Dragon Systems, which the company acquired in May 2000. Since the takeover, over 150 of Dragon's 377 staff have quit the company.

One person with no sympathy for L&H's current plight is the US investment banker Marc Cohodes of Rocker Partners in New York. Having been publicly criticised by L&H in the past for having the temerity to question some of their business decisions, he told a radio show that he hoped Lernout & Hauspie's supporters "will wind up eating cat food under some bridge in Belgium".

AMERICAN LAWYERS DON'T SURF - OR DO THEY?
Legal New Media, the publisher of this ezine, has recently been carrying out some research into the web traffic figures being generated by US legal market web sites and portals. Despite the fact the US has about four times the population of the UK and a substantially higher number of lawyers - over one million compared with just 100,000 in the UK - US web site traffic, both proportionately and in many instances in real terms, is substantially lower than in the UK.

For example, the largest traffic report we found for a single site was reporting only 25 percent more page views than the UK's most visited legal web site interactive-lawyer/LAWTEL. While some of the more niche sites currently have traffic figures that equivalent UK sites operated by the likes of Delia Venables and Nick Holmes/Infolaw were enjoying over twelve months ago.

Of course one possible explanation of the relatively low traffic figures is that many US sites operate on a more parochial, state by state basis. Thus a site that is big in Ohio has no appeal to lawyers in Oklahoma, nevertheless there does seem to be a shakeout taking place within the US online legal market.

The US legal advice and information portal Loislaw.com has agreed to a $95 million takeover bid by the Dutch-based Wolters Kluwer publishing group. When the sale is complete Loislaw will become a unit of Aspen Publishers, a subsidiary of Wolters Kluwer North America. In addition, the online legal directory USLaw.com recently announced it was shedding 16 staff, about 20 percent of its total workforce, in response to "a number of other initiatives to build the businessÓ. And, NoloPress.com has cut back its range of software applications available to Macintosh users on its legal self-help web portal.

These developments also come on top of similar consolidatory moves last year, which saw MyLawyer.com being acquired by the UK's Epoch Software group, FindLaw.com slashing its banner advertising rates by 55 percent and LegalOpinion.com pulling the plug on a $42 million promotional campaign.

MORE BAD NEWS FROM THE INTERNET WORLD
According to new reports by a San Francisco research company, there were 210 failures and 910 mergers by dotcoms in the year 2000. The merger figure is double the level seen in 1999 and nearly 60 percent of the closures occurred in the fourth quarter of last year. Meanwhile Forrester Research reports that according to its research only 23 percent of US content-based web sites are profitable as only 10 percent of consumers said they were prepared to pay for content.

NAPSTER DECLINES TO TURN THE OTHER CHEEK
Despite being embroiled in copyright infringement litigation with most of the music industry, Napster has filed its own intellectual property lawsuit against Sports Service Inc, a Southern California marketing and merchandising company that sells T-shirts and baseball caps featuring Napster's cat logo through its own Napsterstore.com web site. The suit was filed in a US district court in San Francisco.

50,000 DOLLARS TO DESTROY THE DATA
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Buena Vista Internet Group, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney organisation, has offered $50,000 to troubled internet retailer Toysmart.com if that company destroys its customer list, rather than offering the data to a competitor. Buena Vista owns a 60 percent share in Toysmart, which is currently negotiating a bankruptcy court settlement agreement.

STAFF TO SUE OVER EXPRESS WEB SITE CLOSURE?
A total of 46 journalists who used to work on the UK Express newspaper group's Express.co.uk and SportLive.com web sites are considering taking legal action against their former employers and the sites' owners after the division was put into liquidation. The sites were transferred to Richard Desmond's Northern & Shell group after he purchased the Express newspaper business from United News & Media for £125 million in November 2000. After discovering the internet sites were losing a reported £8 million a year, Northern & Shell sold them to stockbrokers Seymour Pierce for a nominal sum - believed to be £1. Seymour Pierce had hoped to sell on the sites to another media group but when it failed to find a buyer, the liquidators Kidsons were called in earlier this week.

The former staff are alleging they were passed from owner to owner and that none of them honoured their financial obligations to their employees in terms of employment contracts and redundancy agreements. The companies have still to make an official response to these allegations. Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal has been running a number of stories in recent months uncovering evidence to suggest that dotcom business are currently some of the worst employers in the United States when it comes to their legal obligations towards their staff.

LEGAL TECHNOLOGY NEWS.COM - FROM THE PUBLISHERS OF LEGAL TECHNOLOGY INSIDER. NEXT ISSUE 18.01.2001