By Kieran Flatt
Clifford Chance (CC) unveiled a major expansion this week of Nextlaw, its legal information service, which increases the system's online channels from two to five – at a cost of more than £1m.
CC claims Nextlaw is the world's most advanced and in-depth legal information service, with the addition of three channels covering online contract formation, digital signatures and, from next month, encryption regulations.
The three channels took 10 months to develop, with 14 full-time workers and more than 100 part-time contributors from around the world.
The channels are split into individual modules, each of which covers a different jurisdiction and costs £2,000 per year for subscribers.
Since the channels contain up to 35 modules, a full channel subscription to Nextlaw can run into hundreds of thousands of pounds.
However, the service is cheaper than commissioning an equivalent paper report from CC – to cover just two of the five channels would cost more than £500,000.
Nextlaw previously offered only two channels, on data protection and bank secrecy.
Its nearest competitor, Blue Flag from Linklaters & Alliance, focuses exclusively on law for financial institutions.
CC is hoping to expand the use of NextLaw, which at present is used mainly by the firm's biggest clients.
Media and communications partner Chris Millard admitted the project was predominantly driven by internal forward thinking, rather than by client demands.
Nextlaw is updated once a month by a team of support lawyers based in London, Australia and Japan. CC denied that this time lag would cause users any problems.
The move comes as fellow City firm Rowe & Maw announced its own online knowledge management system this week, which has taken nearly a year to develop.
The system, dubbed KnowMaw, is the result of a joint development project involving the firm's know-how lawyers, its IT department and software integrators from leading consultants Tikit.
The firm has come to a commercial agreement with Tikit, which will market the customised system to the rest of the sector.