“Bystander” is a JP who writes of his trials (and tribulations) as a lay member of Britain’s ancient legal establishment. Behind the cloak of internet anonymity, he offers verdicts on all who appear before him, in a style rather different from his sober language in court.

“What on earth was on his mind?” he wrote when a newly sentenced offender failed to attend his first two supervised appointments and was duly arrested. “Surely even the dimmest little yob could see that he had reached the end of the line?. . . Sometimes we just have to accept that a few of our clients are beyond any reach of what we would call reason.”

Clues to his identity are carefully pared from his blog: The Law West of Ealing Broadway. He warns readers: “Enough facts are changed to preserve the truth of the tale but to disguise its exact source.” A school classmate is currently serving a 20-year sentence. The blogger’s hobbies are law, aviation, politics and gossip.

Bystander is among the first of a growing number of British legal practitioners who are discovering the confessional solace of an online diary. There is “Gavin”, whose Diary of a Criminal Solicitor vents the various bitter frustrations inherent in dealing with police stations, magistrates, courts and crown courts. Human Law, which contains sober reflections on IP, IT and Employment Law, opens to strains of Hear Me by the psychedelic rock and hip-hop band the Shamen.

Legal blogging, or “blawgging” began in the US. Perhaps the best-known web diarist was “Article III Groupie”, who gained a cult following for excitable postings on “superhotties of the federal jury” and the “Bodacious Babes of the Bench”. Now, according to Nick Holmes, a legal web watcher, blogging is starting to penetrate the consciousness of even UK lawyers. Bystander signed off for Christmas with a list of recent business.

In the last few days he had seen a man of 72 charged with common assault, “a man who is a dead ringer for Ronnie Barker . . . a witness even mentioned it on his statement”, and a prosecution so zealous of the new zero-tolerance policy on domestic violence that it brought a case where “no blow was struck, but a cheap clock was damaged”.

In Diary of a Criminal Solicitor, Gavin often finds himself “in utter amazement or red-faced with anger” as he negotiates the intricacies of the UK justice system. “You will find me ranting and raving in this blog about anything and everything that gets up my nose,” he writes. There was the client who “announced to the world” in court that he had no previous convictions for assaulting police officers when the record showed four such convictions: “This was a case where I expected to, and did, go down in flames,” he writes.

Student blogs aside, the new blogs focus mainly on specialised areas of law, offering updates on cases and statutes such as intellectual property law; the Freedom of Information Act and iNews: Lex in the City, which covers insurance and reinsurance law news.

The Lord Chief Justice’s office said that no judge had applied for permission to blog but that if any did they would have to comply with the Judges’ Council guide to conduct. That says that a judge “like any other citizen, is entitled to freedom of expression, belief, association and assembly, but in exercising such rights, a judge shall always conduct himself or herself in such a manner as to preserve the dignity of the judicial office and the impartiality and independence of the judiciary”.

Delia Venables, an IT consultant, suspects that there is already so much information in the way of e-mail newsletters from law firms and consultancies and updates on the law that she is not sure if people want any more information.

For law firms, there is another downside; blogs will do nothing to draw in the clients.

LEGAL CASE HISTORIES

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Time-worn Freddie gives up Test matches
• Brighton company 'involved in cyber attack'
• The art of survival: it's all in the mind