Not surprisingly, when it comes to the vastness of the internet, the media likes to focus on the new: new technologies, new phenomena, new dangers, new ways to fritter away time, new knee-jerk reactions by large businesses. Newness is also great for consultants and people involved in business development: new initiatives to be launched, new budgets to be created and new corporate policies to be devised.

Clearly, online PR, marketing and recruitment are vital for most businesses. However, just because such systems have become commonplace does not mean lawyers should not be casting their questioning eyes over the hype to make sure their efforts are only applied to the bits that will be productive. And there is much to be questioned about the business value of hyped elements such as blogs, virtual worlds (e.g. Second Life) and social networking sites (e.g. Facebook and MySpace).

Certainly, the biggest opportunities for most law firms in using the internet productively lie in the now unsexy mainstream areas of news together with community and special interest websites. The same applies to internet advertising (namely banners, other advertisements and the annoying pop-ups) where spending is growing at a phenomenal rate, increasingly fuelled by business-to-business marketing waking up to the opportunities already exploited for consumer marketing.

With blogs, the challenge is attracting people to your creation. Clearly, this is hard work. So blogs are following one of the principles of successful advertising – promote yourself where the people you want already hang out.

In addition to the large numbers of community and special interest websites now on the internet, seismic but generally unremarked-upon changes have happened with the traditional media that create fantastic promotional opportunities for lawyers – whether targeting corporates, small and medium enterprises or private clients.

Whether it is the BBC, Legal Week or the Scunthorpe Telegraph, the media has gone online. Most UK print publications – and there are at least 8,000 of these – have their own websites (now mostly with additional content to the print version), and there are others that solely exist online. In addition, there are countless special interest and community sites, while the growth of digital broadcasting means there are now 797 licensed TV channels and about 450 radio stations in the UK, many with shoestring budgets, but still attracting far more visitors than the typical blog.

In a business environment where legislation and regulation are continually introduced and altered, publications want to inform their readers about such changes and often offer basic guidance on following the changes in a way that minimises cost and headaches.

If you combine the increased need profile of lawyers in the media with the explosion of online media and digital broadcasting, there has been a dramatic increase in the marketing and publicity opportunities for law firms of all sizes. This is particularly good news for smaller practices, for who a PR campaign might have been disproportionately expensive, particularly since they can now be very specific about the businesses and groups they target.

For instance, recent changes related to divorce settlements were widely covered by the national newspapers and broadcasters. A law firm client achieved substantial coverage in the UK-based Asian online media explaining the impact on Asian-owned family businesses: the sort of media that has credibility and traction with their target market – in this case Asian business owners. Another client (in the IT sector) gets many clients through people contacting it after seeing answers they post in response to questions on IT bulletin boards – both applying the principles of know your market and target your market in their forums (not by trying to create your own).

There are some negatives to bear in mind with online PR, and the impact can often be amplified if you are in a large and notable firm:

- The media feeds off itself more – for instance, a recent client mention on the BBC website set off enquiries from a range of trade and freelance journalists. Others simply lifted the quote – making it even more vital that inaccuracies are identified and corrected. On top of this, search engines quickly capture these sites – particularly Google, which stores an image of the page (which people can see even if the page is subsequently amended). For instance, an inaccuracy that recently appeared on a leading news site resulted in my having to contact numerous search engines, as well as aggregators such as Factiva and LexisNexis, to get their content amended – even though the error had been rapidly changed by the original website.

- The web means that print and broadcast media are no longer transitory. News, whether good or bad, lingers. Anything you write will be recorded, stored and indexed publicly by Google (so watch what you write – and definitely keep all communications professional). Really awful broadcast interviews have the potential to end up plastered all over YouTube and elsewhere. So besides the huge potential benefits to lawyers from these positive aspects, there are awkward downsides for spokespeople who mess up or whose unfortunate words return to haunt them at a later date.

The constant refinement of technology means there will always be new phenomena and opportunities on the internet, and the really fast and savvy can take advantage of these. But, as a general rule, by the time you read about such opportunities in the press the party is already over. I regularly see people hyping the importance of blogs and other leading-edge developments, often based on pretty flimsy evidence, implicitly trying to scare people into believing they are missing a huge opportunity. There is a huge opportunity, and it is one that most law firms have yet to fully capitalise on – it is in the much more familiar ground of online publications, newsgroups and special interest sites, which now attract little media coverage but plenty of web traffic.