The power of the Web
When I first discovered the internet in about 1996 I decided to create a website focused on my main area of the interest at the time, Contaminated Land in the UK. This was having an increasing effect on UK home owners. As a lawyer dealing with buying an selling property it was potentially a big issue but at that time not many people were interested in it or regarded it as relevant.
I started collecting reports of problems with Contaminated Land and legal documents and published them on my site, initially just one big page, initially written in a text editor.
Quick Route to being Known
What I found amazing was how easy it was to become an acknowledged expert in such a short space of time. The web had bridged the gap between people and publishing. To have become an expert previously I would have had to have published a series of articles or a book. This way, having admittedly put in quite a lot of time, and used my wide experience, I was an expert in less than a year. This lead to journalists contacting me for quotes, my site being noted on university reading lists, my being invited to join a Law Society Committee dealing with environmental matters, my being asked to edit the environmental law chapter of the Conveyancing Handbook and my being asked to contribute to the main UK Legal Precedents Encyclopaedia on the same subject.
The House Buyer Liability Issue
I was very concerned about a big black hole of liability awaiting unsuspecting home buyers as the contaminated land issue grew and believed that solicitors had a responsibility to think about this issue and advise home buyers rather than either pretending it didn't exist or being ignorant of the issue. After several years of intermittent discussion the idea eventually found a powerful champion in Brian Greenwood then the Chair of the Law Society Committee on which I sat. I assume that his firm had had a liability problem which brought this issue to his attention.
A change in how Solicitors deal with buying land
The result was that in 2001 the Law Society issued guidance to the solicitor's profession that effectively required some form of historical land use search to be carried out on each purchase. The effect was create, or make viable, a small industry involved in creating such searches at a cost effective price.
The Public Benefit
The benefit is that generally house buyers in this country now know much more about the previous history of their proposed new home and whether there is a risk of an environmental cleanup claim against them if they buy it. In consequence, they are no longer buying with their eyes closed to potentially devastating liability in the future. ------ends-------
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