AN innovative legal operation co-founded by a senior Borders business figure has just celebrated its second birthday - with a pledge to carry on growing.
Legal Knowledge Scotland offers a unique service to lawyers north of the border, providing easy-to-purchase back office support in areas such as research, training, case study summaries and provision of template documents.
Many of these products can be bought online in just a couple of minutes using a credit card, making the service accessible without delay and at highly competitive prices.
Legal Knowledge Scotland is the brainchild of two practising lawyers, James Aitken - the current Convener of the Scottish Borders Chamber of Commerce - and Andy Duncan. Duncan is a specialist in property, while Aitken specialises in private client and tax and also writes Scotland's only tax blog, Tax Land.
Services are offered to legal firms in the areas of property law, tax, wills, trusts and succession.
The offering is based around the company's web site, www.legalknowledgescotland.com, which includes more than 100 instantly available styles. These can be purchased via subscription or individually.
James Aitken explains: "It might seem obvious for legal firms to keep their support in-house but in reality, the practitioners would rather not do that.
"What's required is fee earning, and these back office services such as training, research and drafting styles or precedents are seen as time consuming rather than revenue generating. That's why they'd rather come to us, and why our service is turning out to be so popular." He continues: "Lawyers need these documents, but they don't want to be distracted from their other work. Buying our template documents is incredibly easy - and as it can be done in moments with a credit card, it takes all the hassle away for them." Andy Duncan, who specialises in the property side, also produces short and concise case studies, distilling them down from perhaps 30 pages to just a few hundred words.
"Along with our other products, these are proving to be incredibly popular," he says. "There's also a lot of free knowledge on the web site. So far, we're the only people in Scotland doing this.
"At the moment, we're happy to keep working in a fairly small number of legal areas. But we've already got clients in all parts of Scotland, and we are now looking at broadening out our offering as we continue to grow."
