Last autumn, before launching the WebVet Internet compliance product, lawyers from Edge Ellison's marketing services unit conducted a dipstick survey of UK-based websites to determine the level of legal protection they contained.

As the first UK firm with a product of this kind, a fixed-fee website vetting service (covering issues such as intellectual property rights, advertising clearance, trademarks, copyright and domain names), we needed to gauge the size of our likely market.

It was a fascinating – if alarming – exercise in market testing. We looked at a mixture of corporate sites and sites devoted to specific brands. They were mostly household names, many marketed globally by their parent companies.