Michael Ferguson

Are we seeing a resurgence in law blogs? Something’s going on. Whether it’s more lawyers seeing the power of blogs, law blogs taking their place alongside traditional legal publishing (or replacing it), the ease of blog publishing today or me just seeing more good law blogs and bloggers, I don’t know. I was speaking with a CMO of a 150 lawyer firm this morning whose firm has three blogs who is looking to upgrade those blogs and add more legal blogs. The non-blogging lawyers saw the amount of client and prospective client engagement generated by the existing blogs and now want to get started with blogs of their own. Later on I received a message from a larger firm that has not traditionally blogged that they wanted to talk blogging, particularly with regard to a tight niche in technology. My colleague, friend and LexBlog’s editor-in-chief and publisher, Bob Ambrogi says that he can feel new energy in legal blogging since he joined LexBlog at the beginning of the year and LexBlog b...

This afternoon I received the below email from LegalZoom : It’s National Make-A-Will Month—let’s do this! National Make-A-Will Month is almost over. We know you want to look out for your family—and we want to help you take care of your planning with a just-added, special 10% discount on an Estate Plan . Independent attorneys are available to answer your questions and guide you through the process. Remember, even if you don’t have all the information to complete your Estate Plan, get the savings now, and then finish when you’re ready. Isn’t it time you finally cross “making a will” off your list? Use discount code PROTECT18 . The email wasn’t an ad. I am a member of LegalZoom – or better put, my company, LexBlog is. We paid $216 a few months ago for a “Business Advisory Plan 6 Month Membership.” A few different reasons we joined. We were looking for an attorney to look at the terms of service on some of our sites. Fairly standard stuff, but we wanted to look at updating some ...

It’s too much to expect that anyone stepping into a brand new position will do a letter-perfect job on day one.. but nothing builds dumb confidence quite like a college degree and zero experience! Paralegal mistakes will happen.  Read on to see the most common mistakes you will want to avoid as you start your career!  As a brand new paralegal, fresh out of school, you’ll feel like

I work with a wonderful team at LexBlog – caring, passionate and cause driven professionals. This year, a legal publishing and reporting legend (and my good friend), Bob Ambrogi joined us as Editor-in-Chief and Publisher to help build a first-of-its-kind legal news and commentary site built on a foundation of legal blog content from throughout the world. LexBlog is seeking a highly motivated associate editor to help build this site. The associate editor will be an integral part of launching and expanding the LexBlog network and helping to build new products and services associated with it. The associate editor will help in developing and managing all aspects of the LexBlog network’s editorial content and social media. This will include curating the best and most newsworthy content from a wide-ranging network of bloggers, recruiting new blogs to join the network, developing original content and authors, developing new publications and products, developing new content partners an...

ILTACon came alive last week in DC for legal tech startups and emerging growth companies – and for folks like me who find these companies interesting. ILTACon (Internal Legal Technology Association), an annual conference for legal technology folks from around the world and ALM’s Legaltech Conference have historically been dominated by large company legal tech. The empahsis being, as it appeared to me, large companies selling to large law firms and corporations. Guys like me who I practiced in a small law firm and started legal tech companies can be overwhelmed. Walking through the exhibit hall in years past I hardly understood what the companies were selling. Sessions seemed to be presented by people from larger organizations. Unlike Clio Cloud, ABA TechShow and AALL Annual (American Assoc of Law Libraries), where I could understand the technology and relate to the people and their causes, I was a little lost at ILTACon. This year seemed different, and maybe it comes do...

In a law firm, one of the major duties paralegals have is requesting and interpreting medical records pertaining to specific cases. The most important and primary step involved in medical record review is organizing the medical records. As this is a highly labor-intensive task, paralegals can obtain reliable medical review services to complete the same quickly and efficiently, however, we most

Link rot in the law is a real problem. Lawyers, law firms, law schools and other legal publishers don’t plan for link rot, nor do they appreciate the link rot they are causing – mostly by their naivety or the naiviety of the party handling their blog land web publishing. Sourcing Wikipedia liberally , link rot happens when links on individual websites, blogs or publications point to web pages, servers or other resources that have become permanently unavailable. Such links are typically referred to as a “broken link” or a “dead link.” Bottom linne, the target of the reference no longer exists – or at least not where it originally existed — and you get a 404 error. Research shows that the half-life of a random webpage is two years. The half-life of a legal page, as evidenced by law blogs, is longer than that. Link rot becomes significant in the law because of the role precedent plays in the law. I don’t follow primary law – code, regs and cases as...

Facebook will cede its runner-up position in website traffic to YouTube in the next couple of months, according to a new study shared with CNBC by market research firm SimilarWeb. From CNBC : The five websites receiving the most traffic in the U.S. in the last several years have been Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo and Amazon , in that order. However, Facebook has seen a severe decline in monthly page visits, from 8.5 billion to 4.7 billion in the last two years, according to the study. Although Facebook’s app traffic has grown, it is not enough to make up for that loss, the study said. The Facebook drop is pretty apparaent when charted.  Facebook has been growing in plenty of markets abroad and Facebook users are now spending more time on other Facebook owned platforms, including Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. YouTube is growing, in part, because of increased use on platforms like Chromecast and Smart TVs. Facebook’s slide doesn’t matter to lawyers — at least those ...

As a legal professional you have multiple places to publish today — Medium, LinkedIn, Forbes, Bloomberg, Above the Law, and many others. But the best place to publish, bar none, is on your own site on your own domain. Sonia Simon e, co-founder and Chief Content Officer of Rainmaker Digital, a widely respected digital marketing provider shared a ten step content marketing checklist this morning. Number one on her list, “Don’t build on rented land.” Before you create a single piece of content, Simones advises that you think about where that content will live and how audiences will get to it. Effective online publishing takes too much time and effort to do otherwise. Nearly all of the content you create needs to live on a domain you control, using a platform you can do as you please with. That means you’re not publishing the bulk of your original creative content on LinkedIn or Medium. (You can still get the excellent benefits of those platforms by syndicating your content there...

The right types of legal software can dramatically improve your ability to manage more cases at once than you thought possible when you were preparing for your career and will have your boss recognizing you for being able to do the work of ten men.  Because it’s so important and because there is so much money floating around the legal field, there are a lot of competing software packages

Will you be attending ILTACon in D.C. next week? Are you running a legal tech startup company that you founded? I’d like to interview you as part of LexBlog’s coverage of ILTACON. More than technology, new funding, customers and products, the interesting stuff (for me) about a legal tech company is the story of how the company got started and, assuming it’s been going for a while, how it’s survived where others have failed. ILTACON, held annually by the International Legal Technology Association, is one of the leading legal tech conferences. Traditionally, the focus is large law, in-house law and the technology companies serving such organizations. This year ILTA is looking to foster innovation for the Legal IT community by shining a light on legal tech startups and emerging growth companies. One way it’s doing so is a  Startup Hub where eight of the over twenty five companies who applied will be exhibiting and doing education sessions. Taking things a step further, LexBlog...

Law blogs published by practicing lawyers, particularly blogs published on niches imoprove people’s access to legal services. “People” refers to any and all of us — consumers, small business people, executive directors, corporate executives and in-house counsel. I’ve never talked with a lawyer publishing a good law blog who hasn’t found that many of the people who contact her or him felt more comfortable doing so because of the lawyer’s blog. Makes all the sense in the world. Imagine looking for doctor in a speciality for a relative in anther city. Google the city and the speciality. You’re apt to get hospital and clinic websites done by marketing people. Areas of Expertise : Dr. B’s expertise includes clinical cardiology, interventional cardiology, echocardiography and nuclear cardiology. Special Interests : Dr. B has special interest in coronary artery disease and peripheral vascular disease. Personal Information : Dr. B enjoys literature, arts and the outdoors....

I was reminded by a Facebook post from technologist and the founder of blogging, Dave Winer , that law blogs need to be hosted for perpetuity. Here’s something basic. If you host blogs, you have an ethical obligation to try to keep the archive online for perpetuity. This allows for bankruptcy or acts of war or god, and mortality, but if you’re not committed to best efforts, then don’t host. If blogs are not archived and made available for reading forever, we’ve lost someone’s insight and commentary. The links to such a blog’s posts would be lost. Citations to such a blog would be meaningless. Imagine if we threw away all the law journal/review articles and legal treatises when the author stopped writing or passed. We got their works off the library shelves and tossed them into the dumpster. Every citation to their works in briefs, court decisions (trial and appellate), briefs, and other journals and treatises would be “dead.” At first glance, you may think, “So what, someone sto...

Facebook will cede its runner-up position in website traffic to YouTube in the next couple of months, according to a new study shared with CNBC by market research firm SimilarWeb. From CNBC : The five websites receiving the most traffic in the U.S. in the last several years have been Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo and Amazon , in that order. However, Facebook has seen a severe decline in monthly page visits, from 8.5 billion to 4.7 billion in the last two years, according to the study. Although Facebook’s app traffic has grown, it is not enough to make up for that loss, the study said. The Facebook drop is pretty apparaent when charted.  Facebook has been growing in plenty of markets abroad and Facebook users are now spending more time on other Facebook owned platforms, including Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. YouTube is growing, in part, because of increased use on platforms like Chromecast and Smart TVs. Facebook’s slide doesn’t matter to lawyers — at least those ...

As a legal professional you have multiple places to publish today — Medium, LinkedIn, Forbes, Bloomberg, Above the Law, and many others. But the best place to publish, bar none, is on your own site on your own domain. Sonia Simon e, co-founder and Chief Content Officer of Rainmaker Digital, a widely respected digital marketing provider shared a ten step content marketing checklist this morning. Number one on her list, “Don’t build on rented land.” Before you create a single piece of content, Simones advises that you think about where that content will live and how audiences will get to it. Effective online publishing takes too much time and effort to do otherwise. Nearly all of the content you create needs to live on a domain you control, using a platform you can do as you please with. That means you’re not publishing the bulk of your original creative content on LinkedIn or Medium. (You can still get the excellent benefits of those platforms by syndicating your content there...