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Legal Blogs as a Community, Worldwide – by Country, by State, by Town and by Niche

Conceptualizing legal blogs, worldwide, as a community makes it easier to conceptualize the network of information these bloggers are creating, the positive impact they are having and how LexBlog can work on a goal that is much bigger than itself – a worldwide legal blog community, including every legal blog. This from an interview with Geo-Cities co-founder, David Bohnett, who was struggling with a way to describe the Internet. “ And one day in 1994, it just came to him. His hosting site didn’t need a technological innovation. It needed a conceptual one. Users needed a new way of navigating the web. So he sketched out a plan to make his website feel more like a real neighborhood. ” Geo-Cities was an Internet company creating websites. “Communities” were easy to understand as a place you live or go to. “GeoCities was creating these communities and then conceptualizing them as places you could go as neighborhoods on the net. So you could be a citizen of a country, and you could th
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Baker McKenzie : Content is Our Conversation With Clients and Audience

Content for lawyers is the currency of engagement. Content is not the end goal. Leah Schloss , Baker McKenzie’s associate director for North American communications, as part of Baker’s being recognized as the leading law firm in Good2bSocial’s The Social Law Firm Index shared: We want our content to resonate with people. We don’t want to put out content that people aren’t engaging with. The content we put out there is for our clients and what they say they need from us. We think of our content as part of a conversation with our clients and audience . (Emphasis added) The end game in legal blogging is not to publish a blog post. That’s just a start. The conversation – the dialogue which ensues from “content” is what leading bloggers are after. It’s from this engagement that reputations and relationships are born. Attending a social event for networking, lawyers keen to business development are not focused on the words they speak – the content – they’re focused on the conversa
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Election Coverage Now Comes From Blogs

Election coverage now comes from blogs. Whether they be blogs run by the mainstream media, blogs that have the status of mainsteam media, such as FiveThirtyEight , blogs published by legal commenators, or citizen bloggers, blogs dominate election coverage. In addition, what Americans read on social media is often a report originally published on a blog. This was not the case not that long ago. Sixteen years ago, the Boston Globe’s Teresa Hanafin , reporting from. the Democratic National Convention shared the following: They don’t have space in the media pavilion, and are forced to pay exorbitant prices for lunch at the press café – unless they are willing to wait in long lines at McDonald’s in the FleetCenter or bring their own food. The crowded workspace they do have is in the rafters of the convention hall, which they would be sharing with pigeons if this were the old Boston Garden. Who are they? They are bloggers: Those who write weblogs, online journals of sorts with regu
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Half of My Blog Posts Are Below Average, But I Don’t Know Which Half

“Half of my blog posts are below average, but I don’t know which half.” This from author and speaker Seth Godin discussing on Faceboook today his latest book, The Practice: Shipping Creative Work . Godin explains that shipping is the work of saying, “Here, I made this for you.” Lots of time, though, it doesn’t work. But Godin, the publisher of over 7,000 blog posts is not sitting around polishing while waiting for perfect. “I’m doing my best to learn, to pay attention and to get better for next time. Perfect is just a place to hide.” Godin has been blogging at Seths Blog for eighteen years. His blog has made him a household name. He’s not worried about the length of a blog post, its demonstration of intellect, the images on the post, its search engine performance, the distribution of the blog or stats. We don’t ship because we’re creative, we’re creative because we ship, per Godin. Legal bloggers are not creative in their intellect, they’re creative because they ship. They p
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Blogging Software Startup the Imepetus For LexBlog, Seventeen Years Ago

Moving into a larger home has allowed me to open up boxes of books and magazines from years back. Doing so I stumbled across the November, 2003 edition Business 2.0, the Fortune and Business Week of the startup world. You see, evolving from trial lawyer to legal tech entrpreenur I couldn’t read enough about startups. No idea why me, but my greatest fear was that the tech world would pass me by without me being on the front of the wave. Jeff Bezos was on to something, and I needed to figure how to develop a startup for people looking for legal information and services. My passion was all the more intense when LexisNexis aquired my first startup, a virtual legal community, launched in 1996. “I lost my baby and will never have another great idea,” I worried while working out my garage while playing ot the last couple months of my non-compete in November of 2003. Then it happened, seventeen years ago this month. Late one evening, I picked up the November edition of Business 2.0, 160
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Seth Godin: Legal Bloggers Should Be Seeking the Minimum Viable Audience

At Clio Con (Clio’s Cloud Nine annual conference) a couple weeks ago, Seth Godin advised lawyers that they should be seeking the minimum viable audience in their business development efforts. Godin has made blogging a lynchpin in growing his name and reputation as a speaker and author. His almost twenty years of blogging on Seth’s Blog , a blog publication, separate and apart from his website, has made him a household name in the marketing field. Godin’s Clio discussion may as well have been directed to blogging lawyers. After all, it’s the blogging lawyers who get the opportunity to build a strong name and develop business in a niche more than other lawyers — and to do so much faster. Why a minimal viable audience? Read what Godin shared on his blog a couple years ago: “ Of course everyone wants to reach the maximum audience. To be seen by millions, to maximize return on investment, to have a huge impact. And so we fall all over ourselves to dumb it down, average it out, pleasi
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Connecting Lawyers With People, For Good, Since 2003

“Connecting lawyers with people, for good, since 2003,” feels like a much nicer – or least more mature – mantra than “We build blogs for the lawyers.” The latter from when we kicked things off at LexBlog in November, 2003. The Internet is about connecting with people in a real and intimate way. Always has been, always will be. There’s no such thing as differentiating between a “virtual world” and a “face-to-face” world.” One world, different mediums of engagement. Engagement leading to intimate relationships of trust. The last two weeks I heard again about the latent legal market in the United States. First at Clio Con and this week at LMA Annual. Depending on the survey, seventy-five to eighty-five percent of people with a legal issue – and who may be able to afford a lawyer – do not use a lawyer. The big reasons are that they don’t trust lawyers, they don’t know what lawyers do and, even if they did, they don’t know how to find a good lawyer. Shows you that despite lawyers, co
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