History
With a new breed of businesses emerging in the late-1990s, the firm decided that a new approach to addressing the needs of technology companies should be tried. The answer was Out-Law.com, which launched on 5th May 2000.
The name was chosen to reflect the attitude of the new media and e-commerce businesses which grew out-with mainstream business and which often saw themselves as outsiders in the business world. This is in stark contrast to the business insiders who tended to dominate in the 1980s. The team behind the site was anxious to avoid terms which contained e- or @ or other technology clichés; equally, legal jargon and clichés were shunned. This is a web site on which you'll find neither Latin maxims nor images of circuit boards, light bulbs and scales of justice.
Out-Law.com was not founded to be just another law firm web site. It explained IT, e-commerce, privacy, software, tax, employment and other issues that businesses need to know about and is updated every day. In 2011 it expanded from its base in technology law to cover all areas of business law.
Out-Law is not just an advert for the firm behind it. Instead, the site explains what you need to know in terms that you can understand.
Many law firms claim to "speak your language" – which sounds good, until you see how they write. As a business person, you'll want answers to legal problems; but you don't necessarily want to know that a particular answer is based on the precedent of half a dozen court cases or Section 234 (b)(iii) of an esoteric piece of legislation. Out-Law.com's approach is to keep everything informative but readable. And that approach has proved popular.
The initial target market – start-ups, internet businesses, new media companies – quickly embraced the web site; but so have multinationals, government bodies, academic institutions and in-house lawyers, all over the world.
Out-Law has evolved, encompassing at various points a magazine, client extranets and two complete overhauls, the most recent of which, in 2011, expanded the reach of the site across all areas of business law.
With new content added every day (there are over 11,000 web pages of free legal information) and new services constantly being developed, Out-Law.com has become widely recognised as one of the best legal resources around. Our aim is to keep making it better.