The UK LAW-LIS group has been overheating with complaints and worries for the past 24 hours over PLC’s recent service issues after a very glitchy upgrade of their service in September.
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UK law librarian David Percik has taken the issue on under the auspices of the BIALL Legal Information Group and is currently compiling a report that we hope will be delivered to PLC’s doorstep.
It’s seems to us that PLC’s IT arm is trying as hard as possible to solve the issues and help clients but the sales and communications side of the company isn’t making a similar effort..
In the meantime here’s a round up by the information services manager at UK firm Clyde & Co, Andrew Gregg? who writes to LIS-LAW
I have now had 20+ responses to my e-mail from firms have had or continue to have problems with PLC (reproduced at foot of e-mail).
I think a significant part of the problem has been the way that PLC have dealt with this. In the first instance there was no notification that this upgrade was happening – even though deep links to PLC updates pages had to be changed. After that they were very cagey and waited for affected users to contact them rather than soliciting contact from people with problems.
What really frustrates me is the number of people who have been told that they were the only firm affected (although being fair that does not apply to us) or that the number of firms affected was very small (suspect that this is not so from the speed and number of the responses). It does strike me that as an organisation PLC seems to have stuck its head in the sand about these problems.
Some people have praised PLC responsiveness and for them sending IT people out to try and resolve the issues (but we did not receive that offer despite the fact that we are one of the top 20 law firms in the country and thus presumably one of their larger customers). One firm that no longer seems to be having problems forwarded me an advice note from PLC they were sent in September – I have seen this note however we were only sent it last Friday. And how they expect me to arrange for PLC cookie deletion on up to 500 users computers (many of whom are in our overseas offices and operating on different IT systems) I do not know.
Various people are talking about compensation/refunds/reductions on renewal. Other people are cautious about making a fuss in case it impacts financially on their next renewals or what they are charged if they wish to extend their subscriptions.
What I really want is for the issues to be resolved – however for what it’s worth ?I think our best bet is to push for gratis extension to our current contracts to cover the period the service has not been functioning correctly, therefore people would be compensated for the period they were not receiving the service that they paid for – it would also be a motivator for them to resolve the issues speedily.
Thanks to everyone who responded – I think it is good to know that we are not alone and Lis-Law and BIALL are great for this.
Some clients are happier than others. Following are a couple of the comments that appeared on LIS-LAW yesterday
We had big problems after the upgrade work that PLC carried out we couldn’t access the service at all – it turned out to by our own security system – it was blocking it!!
The problem was resolved by PLC IT dept talking directly with our IT guy
And again our rep was extremely helpful
Since we took up the UK package I have not had any complaints this end about not being able to work on any documents
We’ve had lots of trouble recently but appears to be working ok today so far !
