Frequently asked questions
Questions
Answers
- Where did this all start?
- My case appears on your database
- Back in 1989 – believe it or not. DLS (swarb) ran a bulletin board called ‘Just Mooting’. It was in the days before the WWW, and when you could have an internet if you paid four chaps to come along for a few days to install and test one. It was run in conjunction with the Northern Branch of the Society for Computers and Law. The first modem used was a 300/1200 bit one – for that time super fast. It represents about 1/10,000 of the speed we take for granted today. It was a dial up service. To contact the BBS, you got your modem to ring in on the dedicated land-line number.
It came to be really quite well known among the very few people who used such systems. There was once a worldwide directory of on-line information systems. We were listed in importance between the US Copyright agency and the US House of Congress. We used to have a peak of about 25 calls in per day, but most days we had a dozen or so. It was at this stage that we began to collect bits of law text which might be useful for download. We (I) have been collecting them ever since.
Along came the internet. Demon Internet Services Ltd started up in 1991, providing a system allowing you to dial up to use email, ftp and usenet. I was one of the first of Demon’s customers. This was still before the days of the Web. Though the web existed, it generally took substantial bandwidth, and was something for the future.
It was soon clear that usenet provided a better mechanism for discussion than did the bulletin board system. I habited alt.legal for a while. There was a discussion about the need for something British, and alt.uk.legal was suggested. A then student barrister (name ?) actually pushed the button, but I was quite close behind encouraging him. uk.legal was born and much of what was to become swarb.co.uk was posted there.
In 1992 – about February – I was to give a lecture in Leeds for SCL. Something went wrong so we went to the pub instead. I had a chat with a certain DSM and we came to disagree about whether a speadsheet had a place in a lawyer’s office. I said that O would demonstrate something for him. A day or so later I began indexing the law reports from the Times.
At that time I had my own very small solicitors’ practice in Brighouse. I could not thoil (bear to pay out for/afford) buying law reports. I therefore collected the reports from the Times. This was fine, but not much use without an index. I therefore began a very modest index of Times cases using Borland’s Quattro Pro. At that time the data fields were limited to 80 characters, and therefore so were any notes. This had several virtues. It won me a pint (debt still not paid if you ever read this DSM!). It forced me to read the cases every day, and annotating them caused me to have to read them properly. It worked as a usable index within the office. After a few months I managed to start exporting the index to a text tile which I posted to usenet, and on JM.
It grew very slowly, but I made it freely available. It gave my firm an undue prominence in certain circles, and others thought it demonstrated my own commitment to real law.
The web arrived and I pondered at first whether it would be worth getting a web-site, and if so how. Others were similarly cogitating. An acquaintance at the Law Society had a similar duty for them, and one of his first problems was how he could populate the new Law Society web-site with content. He asked, and I agreed that in return for them co-hosting a web-site for me, my law-index would also appear on their web-site. Being done in the way that it was this was a bit of a committee job, and id not happen suddenly. Another acquaintance at Clifford Chance in London was also looking to start their web-site. I am told that hearing of our intended flowering, he flew across to the US to give a boot up the backside of their hosting company so as to make sure that they were ahead.
They won. By just a week, they were the first UK firm of solicitors to have a web-site, and Swarbrick & Co, solicitors, of Brighouse was the second. In those days, the maximum length allowed for a name was 8 characters, so I chose swarb.co.uk. For the first year or so, I also had the privilege that when you logged onto the web-site of the Law Society of England and Wales, the first thing you saw after their name was ‘swarb.co.uk’ and our law index.
. . more to follow.
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Yes, it might. Sometimes this is embarrassing, we know. We have no desire to cause such embarrassment, but justice is necessarily and inevitably public. If your case appears here, it will appear also on several other sites. Publication of data is permitted under the Data Protection Act for purposes connected with the administration of justice – and this site is here for that purpose – to assist lawyers and litigants to present their own cases by reference to others (including possibly yours).
We welcome discussion about particular instances, and there are many times when we can assist – but we make no promise. Please do contact us at dswarb@gmail.com.
