History of OUT-LAW

Pinsent Masons is a law firm that came into being on 6th December 2004, the result of a merger between two firms:  Pinsents and Masons. The roots of each firm can be traced back to the 19th Century, but it was in the 1980s that Masons began building a reputation for its legal services to technology firms. With a new breed of businesses emerging in the late-1990s, the firm decided that a new approach was needed. The answer was OUT-LAW.COM. It 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 is not just another law firm web site. It explains IT, e-commerce, privacy, software, tax, employment and other issues that businesses need to know about and it's updated every day. It's not just an advert for the firm behind it. Instead, the site explains what you need to know in terms that you can understand and it gives supporting legal documents for free where most others would charge.

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.
 
In 2001, the OUT-LAW Magazine was launched – again, unlike anything any other law firm currently produces. In 2002, client extranets became available. In 2004, we realised the site had outgrown its original design and a complete overhaul took place. The changes launched on 5th May 2005, five years to the day since the site began.

With new content added every day (there are over 7,000 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.