Blue Chi’s

I recently bumped into the latest new Omani website on the Internet: Oman Legal Zone. OLZ is a website founded by Rozalin Al Bulushi (her real name, we are not related and we never met). Rozalin is a legal advisor at the Telecommunication Regulation Authority (TRA) and has very recently launched this website with the goal of providing the public with affordable legal service online at affordable prices. According to its founders, the launch of the OLZ was not actually influenced by the recent passing of the Eletronic Transactions Law, but the general trend in Oman of moving towards e-commerce made this seem like the right time to launch such a website.

Services currently offered at OLZ include legal advice services, contract drafting services, IP registration services, and a free find-a-lawyer service. OLZ will also provide in the future online training services and legal book order services. The book delivery service should be up within 2 to 3 months and its rate will vary depending on the delivery method.

All the currently available services of OLZ may be requested by filling an online form that lets you upload all the documents and materials relevant to your case or contract and submitting your request. An OLZ staff will presumably respond to your request with the details on how to move forward. Currently, the website does not provide any actual rates nor does it actually specify the payment methods, however, I have contacted OLZ and I was informed that OLZ accepts Paypal and direct bank deposit. It is worth noting that you cannot use Paypal to send money online from a Omani bank yet, so the only real method for making payment to OLZ is through direct bank deposit if you are in Oman.

I think that OLZ is a great idea, we do not have any Omani legal resource in the English language in Oman and having an online portal for receiving legal requests is cool. However, I feel that OLZ has several major flaws that will prevent it from being a major success:

1. OLZ appears anonymous and untrustworthy: Even though you now know the person behind it, it is not actually written anywhere on the website, we do not know who is on the ‘claimed’ team of OLZ. The legal business is heavely based on trust and you cannot trust somebody you do not know. You need to dig down and read the fine print of the terms of conditions of the website to learn that OLZ is NOT a law firm nor does it seem to be registerd in any shape or form. Who is going to dare submit his confidential information whether regarding a legal advice, a contract, or even a description of his intellectual property to an anonymous website?

2. OLZ is not registered: Beside the trust issue mentioned above, to my understanding of the law, providing legal services such as legal advice and contract drafting requires a license as stipulated by the Advocacy Law. I contacted OLZ and asked them the following:
   

   BC: The terms of the website state Oman Legal Zone is not a law firm. However, the services offered by the website are the same as those mentioned in Article 2 of the Advocacy Law (108/96) and offering these services can arguably be said to require an Advocacy License in accordance with that law. Article 6 of the same law also prohibits an employee of any government authority from performing any of the advocacy services while they are in service. Any comments on this?

   OLZ’s responsded with the following:
   

   OLZ: Our website is run by a team. There are two lawyers in the team. Thus, we have no problem of conflict with that Act. Furthermore, what we are trying to do in Oman Legal Zone is to assist individuals to advice them in the minor legal issues and we draft simple contracts to them. However, if they need a registered lawyer or we think that they need one we directly forward their inquires to one after inform the customer and in this case we do not charge him/ her anything. In addition, all that mentioned in our Terms of Services “right”.

   In my opinion, the fact that the service is provided by more than one person is not relevant to the issue of the license requirement. Legal advice and contract drafting are both explicitly mentioned in the Law as activities which can only be carried a licensed lawyer. You can read the law yourself here [PDF - Arabic], and its amendments can be found here, here, here, and here.

3. OLZ is not making any significant use of technology: the current OLZ website does not provide any functionality for registering as a client with a unique log-in name and a private request status portal. In fact, the website provides a mere mail form that is not even delivered using any secure transfer protocol or encryption.
4. Unfortunately, I also discovered that the privacy statement of OLZ has been copied off Yahoo!’s privacy policy. OLZ privacy policy talks about services offered by Yahoo and even links to pages on Yahoo about deleting user accounts, cookies, web beacons, and advertisements. OLZ also has a section in which copied articles from local and regional newspapers are pasted. This use obviously exceeds fair-use and consititutes a copyright violation. Attributing the source is not a defence under copyright.

OLZ surely can improve on many of the things mentioned above. The trust issue can be overcome by being more open about what OLZ is and providing profile pages for the team members behind OLZ. OLZ must also make sure that they own service is not illegal. Once these things are established OLZ can further improve its website by using functionality that ehances their offering and provides clients with the security they need to transmit their information on the web.

The Omani web is obviously still not mature enough, but I think that we are going through an interesting phase as we see more content websites popping up all the time, especially websites that serve a specific purpose and have a focused goal such as OLZ. I still wish OLZ the best of luck and hope that they clean up their act and succeed.