A new website

The time has come to upgrade the Erina Legal Website.

This blogsite (and the erinalegal.com.au site) receive several dozen visitors a month. This isn't a paragon effort of web marketing but we are a small business servicing a local community and web marketing is not what we are about.

We originally put up the www.erinalegal.com.au website with little thought of how it would be used, except as a means of putting ourselves in front of people who are looking for lawyers via Google or Yahoo. Over time we also realised clients were looking at the site to investigate what sort of people they had become involved with. Just who were these people at Erina Legal. That's when I decided to start up this blog site.

The purpose of the blogsite is to personalise the online experience. I wanted to introduce people to the staff and what we are about. It was also more flexible and easy to use that the original website. (Again - we are not web marketers here.)

Now the time is at hand to upgrade the website and I am interested in the thoughts of visitors to this blog about what would make for an improvement to what we have.

If you are a client or a prospective client please add a comment (click the comments link below) about what you like and don't like about our site, and what you would like to see here instead.

Thanks for your help,
Craig

Improve your business with quality assurance

Become ISO 9001 compliant with Erina Legal.

What is ISO 9001?
It is an international standard for quality assurance systems that can help you reduce costs, and achieve better returns on investment, as well as sell your products and services to more customers.

The ISO 9000 family is primarily concerned with quality management. This means what the organization does to fulfill the customer's quality requirements, and applicable regulatory requirements, while aiming to enhance customer satisfaction, and achieve continual improvement of its performance in pursuit of these objectives.

The principles behind IS)9000 are customer focus, leadership, involvement of people, process approach, system approach to management, continual improvement, factual approach to decision making, and mutually beneficial supplier relationships.

How does this help me?
By putting systems in place to manage quality you will help improve the reliability of your services and reduce the likelihood of letting clients and customers down. If fact it doesn'tÂ’t just reduce yourlikelihoodd of litigation, it increasescustomerr satisfaction and improves sales.

More about ISO9000:2000, ISO9001 at Wikipedia or at the ISO website

Family Winner - computer aided divorce

‘The principal institution of the law is not trial; it is settlement out of court’ [1]
- This is the quoted first line of the paper (link below) by academics Bellucci and Zeleznikow.

A new computer program called Family Winner has been developed to assist in the negotiation process for people involved in divorces and de-facto separations. A pair of Victorian IT academics has created it: John Zeleznikow and Emilia Bellucci.

Basically the system gets parties to rank their assets in order of importance to them. The program then produces a recommendation of how to distribute the assets across the parties. The recommendation is based upon people’s own priorities.

The idea behind the program is not to replace the use of mediators and lawyers in facilitating separation, but in streamlining and speeding up the negotiation process and getting to the key issues up for negotiation.

With separating couples required to try to resolve disputes before filing with the Family Court, Professor Zeleznikow expects there will be a need for mediators.

The product is not yet generally available.

See SMH Article [2]
See the academic article [3]

[1] Ross, H. L., 1980, Settled Out of Court, Aldine
[2] Adele Horin, Divorce? Let the computer be the judge, SMH 21/09/05
[3] John Zeleznikow and Emilia Bellucci, 2005, Family Winner: Integrating Game Theory and Heuristics to Provide Negotiation Support, www.jurix.nl

Winners

Congratulations to our winners from the Business Expo competition. Each of them has won a USB memory stick, which are useful devices.

The winners are:

• Daniel Aitken - Trance Design
• Lee Clark - Work Smart Communications
• Samantha Woods - Vibrant Concepts
• Ali Vidler - Central Coast Printing

More Shared Parenting Proposals in Family Law Reforms

In its review of the Government's family law reforms, the House of Representatives Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee has endorsed the changes but recommended greater rights for non-custodial parents.

The committee also proposed the development of accreditation standards for Family Relationship Centres, family dispute practitioners, and contact centres as a matter of urgency.

More

Source: Findlaw

Central Coast Business Expo

A big hello to all the people we met at the Central Coast Business Expo.

Wayne and I had a great time staffing the stall and meeting people over the two days we were at the Expo, and so did the rest of the team when they came up for half day visits.

A special hello to the teams at Central Coast Uniforms and RAMS, our neighbors at the Expo.

Overall we consider the Business Expo to be a successful event for our business in terms of raising exposure of Erina Legal to the local business community.

Erina Legal has plenty of advice for businesses in all stages of their life from start-up and growth through to winding the business down or selling out, as well as at those critical decision points along the way. We can also assist business owners and managers in assessing risks and opportunities in a legal context.

Call us on 02 4365 6556 or drop by the office if you would like to know more.