Minter Ellison has launched its own online news portal in a major challenge to the established order of legal publishing and law firm marketing.

“It’s a new concept and a world first – there’s nothing anywhere else quite like this,” said senior legal consultant Dr Bob Austin, who is spearheading the project for Minters.

The service, known as the Corporate HQ Advisory news hub, aims to be a central resource for directors, general counsel and company secretaries on the topics of corporate governance and corporate law. Topics covered include risk management, reporting and directors’ duties.

The service will provide a digest-style news feed and longer analytical articles. There are no journalists or writers employed at present and all content is written by Minter Ellison lawyers under the supervision of a dedicated group of senior staff led by Austin.
 
“Our team every morning allocates summary jobs – we call them posts – to the whole team across the Minter Ellison network; young lawyers who are prepared to spend half an hour or an hour summarising some news in the press that day,” said Austin. “Our sources include obviously foreign newspapers as well as Australian ones and also academic journals and blogs. Every day we will have six or eight summaries, maybe more.”

Austin said that lawyers had been instructed to respect copyright law in this process. “We are summarising news, not the way it is expressed by the journalist,” he said.

The HQ Advisory team is staffed with systems administration, IT and BD expertise. There is also a communications person, but this is for marketing purposes rather than copy-editing, the latter function being performed by Austin and other senior lawyers.

A service has a weekly subscription newsletter containing links to recent stories. Readers need to be members of the service in order to click through to each story. Membership is free, but as a general rule will not be made available to persons working for rival firms, Austin said. Minters has garnered “several hundred” members since launching last week, and this is expected to grow to well over 1000.

The firm is still exploring a number issues related to the service, such as allowing a comments field and joining forces with like-minded groups on Linked In.

Next week - ANALYSIS:  Brave move by Minters – but will it gain traction?