Kian, whats going on? No article on SAM Partner promotions. No article on CAM equity promotions. Long article On Saraf and partners with a lot being from previous articles. That was pay-walled for a while but didnt really have anything that needed a subscription. Only thing new are these conversations. What is the future of LI and what are your plans? Also, why make an article on Saraf and partners and not other firms?

Hi, apologies for the lack of updates, LI is on a bit of a summer/monsoon hiatus at the moment.

Also, partially in light of the Intermediaries Rules, we are currently still finalising the long-term plans for LI. The picture as it currently stands is: LI is not and will not be involved in any business activity whatsoever anymore and we have removed all monetisation from the site.

This includes a stop on all advertising (as you can see in the banners above in association with the Covid Rural Response Tracker project, we may only be carrying ads of non-profits or other non-business causes in future, without payment).

We have also closed paid subscriptions but will be grandfathering accounts of former subscribers at some point into free legacy subscriptions, where they will continue receiving alerts and early access to articles.

The quantity of articles will likely decrease, though we still hope to cover things important to the community going forward, though maybe not with the same regularity as previously.

Happy to take (non-trollish) feedback and suggestions from readers like you, of course. :)

So essentially, you seem to be saying that LI is essentially finished as a commercial enterprise. Is this a larger step back from LI itself from the owners/founders? What were the concerns that you see in the Intermediary Guidelines...is it the fact that the industry you report on is likely to, or is actively using the Intermediary Guidelines to try and limit content relating to them on LI?

It seems to me that the legal industry would love to use the IG as a weapon to prevent gossip and negative publicity with respect to themselves on LI, is this a reason why the long term viability of LI (as it stands today) is in question?

Genuine questions.

Some of those questions we don't have full answers to yet but we do believe the LI platform is providing a useful service to the legal community and in particular to the LI community, which we hold very dear.

We therefore feel that a non-commercial and part-community-run model might be a more robust and healthy one in the long-term, both in light of the new regulatory regime and to allow the continued open exchange of information by readers.

As such, we are looking at this as a new beginning, rather than an end.

As mentioned, we are still working out details and will keep you posted. If anyone wants to get in touch in the meantime with thoughts or ideas, please drop us a line ({contactus}) with a WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal-enabled phone number. We'd love to hear from you and we'd be happy to chat further.

I understand you think non-commercialization, unlike Bar and Bench, is better for the community. But why not just put basic Google ads and draw some revenue? Without any form of income generation from this site, I feel it'll get quite demotivating for you to keep it running it in a regular and professional style.

If the Intermediaries Rules are the concern, then how about turning into a Wikipedia style community driven reporting model? Basically, the Conversations feature stays - but instead of them being random anonymous discussions, they can be used by willing contributors to generate quality news articles. You can set certain standards/guidelines to check quality of sources; additionally, users can edit/update the article by providing appropriate sources (similar to Wikipedia again). It can also contain good quality blog articles. If you want to incentivize people, you can give them a certain portion of the ad revenue that the article generates. (Though I don't think you'd need it, Wikipedia has done pretty well without any incentives.)

That way, LI can develop into an informative and community driven news reporting platform - a good alternative to Bar and Bench which is too commercialized and LiveLaw which is too formal legal reporting.

Direct result of the new IT rules. I know Kian gets a lot of shit around here but I honestly fucking love (loved?) LI's coverage/community. This fucking sucks. No other platform has a similar feel to it, I feel. Bar & Bench feels too commercialised and LiveLaw is very useful but focused mostly on hard legal updates. LI always felt like it struck the exact balance. I'll miss the regular coverage.