Entrepreneur Stays on Form

Richard Wray, The Guardian. Tuesday, November 15, 2005.

Reed Elsevier must be suffering a bout of deja vu after a Scottish entrepreneur started up an online business identical to the one he sold the Anglo-Dutch publishing empire four years ago.

Russell Shepherd has launched Capform.co.uk, which makes thousands of government forms freely available on the web. The business is essentially the same as Everyform.net, which he sold to what is now LexisNexis Butterworths in 2001.

The reason that the serial entrepreneur Mr Shepherd has returned to the sector is that over the summer LexisNexis started charging customers for the use of Everyform.net, wrapping it into the rest of its new information platform.

The move took Mr Shepherd by surprise and is the latest example, he said yesterday, of old media businesses failing to understand the dynamics of the internet. The Everyfrom.net site was understood to be one of the most popular elements of Butterworths online service. While it was under Mr Shepherd's ownership, it grew from a standing start to serving 12,000 users.

"Surely the whole point of the internet is to generate lots and lots of traffic and then to develop innovative ways of generating revenues," said Mr Shepherd.

LexisNexis Butterworths has replaced Everyform.net with Forms Assured, which supplies customers with a complete list of forms on CD. Mr Shepherd, in contrast, intends to make all forms generated by the government - from Land Registry to tax forms - free online. Next year he hopes to introduce charges.

A spokesman for Reed Elsevier said it did not consider Capform.co.uk to be a direct competitor as its own service offered a searchable database that gives customers the information they need, rather than just a form.