Award-winning Web site Freelawyer put up for sale

Legal advice Web site Freelawyer has been put up for sale to individual law firms by its owner, Judicium.The award-winning site, which allows users to get free legal information and puts them in contact with law firms, claims to have 500,000 users a year and is available on an exclusive annual licence basis.Former barrister and co-founder of the site, Alex Mehta, said: 'Legal services are a commodity these days and we can offer a firm 60,000 people a month via exclusive rights to Freelawyer.

If it was sold, Judicium would retain ownership of the site, but the law firm could do what they liked with it and turn it into their platform on the Internet.'Mr Mehta said he could not reveal the identity of those interested in the product, but that the company was talking to 'several firms simultaneously at present, all of which are regional firms hoping to take the next step to becoming national players'.Judicium chief executive officer Leon de Costa added that negotiations were under way with a midlands and a south-east law firm as well as a publishing company.

'We are quite a way down the road with one of the law firms,' he said.

Legal IT expert Charles Christian said: 'I suspect that while the site gets a lot of traffic, there simply wasn't the volume of lawyers signed up to provide their services.

The public use Freelawyer to get free legal information, but there are so many on-line legal services out there that firms are hedging their bets about committing to one.'He said that law firms are waiting for the number of similar legal service sites to reduce 'so they can see who the major players are'.'Freelawyer is still by far the busiest non-institutional, non-publishing law site,' he added.

'As the front end to a single legal service provider, I think it would be invaluable.'Andrew Towler