Michael Ferguson

Law firms, law schools, public relations firms and even the courts use third party publishing solutions — and, by doing so, many hand over control of their content to third party publishers.  Most of the publishing solutions the creators of the content pay for and some creators give their content to the third party publisher in exchange for distribution.  Examples include: Legal scholarship published on third party solutions, many of those third party publishers then licensing the use of such content by subscription. Articles and blog posts the creators pay to have distributed by distribution services, some of which index the content in the distributor’s names, versus the creator’s names. Articles written for third-party publishers and news sites in exchange for the publicity and notoriety. Courts empowering large legal publishers to publish case law which third party publishers then sell effective access to the law back to people.  This made sense before digita...

I blogged last week that Bloomberg Law may be playing fast and loose with lawyers’ contributions to Bloomberg.  I didn’t share the post on LinkedIn and Facebook as I usually do because it was Thanksgiving Eve. I didn’t want to be perceived as being critical of someone over the holiday. And realistically, everyone had “gone home” for Thanksgiving. Not many business colleagues were going on LinkedIn or Facebook engaging on industry related matters over the holiday weekend. Today, I realized I hadn’t shared my post so I did so on both of the social networks. Not for reach or traffic, per se, but for relationships — and learning. I am not a big one to look at web stats and analytics on blog posts. Truth be told, I don’t know where to access my stats. What I do like is the engagement with people that ensues from blogging. Especially with people I know, people I respect, people I learn from and maybe even people LexBlog has the nor to do business with. Engaging people means going...

Fifteen years ago today, I published my first post on this blog, ‘Real Lawyers Have Blogs’ which I call ‘Real Lawyers,’ for short these days. I had no idea what a blog was. I was interested in finding out what a web based service named TypePad was all about — something I came to understand later to be a web-based blog platform. I had read they expected to have 10,000 paying users within 90 days of their launch – those were AOL numbers in my mind.  I swiped my credit card for $4.95 a month and I penned my first post and published it – only after reviewing it for a day or two – and I was on my way for the journey of a lifetime. On Thankgsgiving Day, it’s only apropos that I share what this blog, I and LexBlog are thankful for, as I result of ‘Real Lawyers.’ LexBlog is not a company that decided to have a blog. LexBlog was born from this blog. So bear with me as to who is thanking who. For all of you readers. Who’d have know that just penning a blog about stuff I thought i...

I received an email from PLI this week letting me know that the url to a piece I cited for a book being published by PLI and authored by the former CMO of a major law firm no longer exists.  We are checking the proof for…… book, and when I attempted to verify the url for the…… article you cited……, the page no longer exists on  biglawbusiness.com  (Bloomberg Law). And now looking at the sentence attached to the footnote, I realized this might be a direct quote from……, is that correct? (Currently, it is not in quotes.). Please let me know how you want us to proceed. We cannot include the broken link, but can keep the reference if you can provide another url, or perhaps if you can verify that it does exist on Bloomberg Law (might it only be available to subscribers?), maybe we can provide a general link to Bloomberglaw.com. Otherwise, can we delete this text regarding……, as we can’t have a quote without a source? The piece I cited was an article written by the Assistant ...

Come January, I’ll have been a member of LinkedIn for fifteen years. I’ve made over 13,000 connections during this time. I don’t share this to impress you, but to impress upon you the impact of one simple habit of mine. That being to pen a personal note to the person to whom I asked to connect on LinkedIn and to the person whose request to connect I accepted. Sure there may have been a few I misssed, but I am certain I hit 95% or more. That’s over 10,000 notes, brief as they were.  Why did I do it?  There sure wasn’t a LinkedIn protocol, No one was holding themselves out as experts teaching us how to use LinkedIn. Today’s new lawyers hadn’t any use for LinkeIn back then, they were in the sixth grade. I sent the personal notes because I thought it the right thing to do. The polite think thing to do. How could I send out my first request to connect, something I was reluctant to do, without a note attached introducing myself and telling the person why I was asking to conne...

Being the director of career services is not an easy job at most law schools today.  Assuming you’re not working at a top tier law school, you have more grads than jobs. Combine that with declining budgets at many law schools leaving you understaffed. Despite the challenges, career services directors have one thing their predecessors never had, the Internet. Networking through the Internet for building out the reputation of the school, nurturing relationships with potential employers, connecting with bloggers and traditional reporters so they’ll be writing about your school and its grads and learning what it takes to succeeed today by networking with leaders in the industry. Networking through the Internet requires strategic and effective use of Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and a blog. Not by someone in the career services’ office or a communications’ person working for the law school. But by the director of career services networking in a real and authentic fashion in their o...

LinkedIn is becoming much more like Facebook – and that’s a good thing for lawyers looking to build relationships and a reputation. Facebook has always been a place to share professional and personal items, stay abreast of news and information and to engage each other through likes and comments as well as messages through Facebook Messenger. The Facebook algorithms work overtime to put in front of you the posts and people you want to see. This results in networking on steroids both on Facebook and offline with just the audience you want to be hanging out with, professionally and personally. LinkedIn has been more a close to the vest, stodgy, business connection/Rolodex world. When people shared items on LinkedIn, especially lawyers and law firms, it wasn’t really sharing, it was pushing content at people that they were not seeing otherwise. An eyeballs kind of thong. Enough so that content syndication companies automatically “syndicated” legal content through LinkedIn for law firm...

Yesterday, our tech and products team greenlighted our going to market with a new product for the syndication of legal blog posts from the LexBlog news and commentary platform. If this were a story from a business school textbook or a large company, I might share how we studied the market, looked at production costs, analyzed pricing and surveyed potential customers. But I don’t believe that takes place in small entrepreneurial companies. I know it doesn’t take place at LexBlog. This product came about from a dinner conversation at a conference with someone I had never met before.  After social conversation, he shared a challenge he was having. He wasn’t sure that he and his organization were taking the right approach. When he asked my opinion we got into a discussion of what if it did this or that? A half hour later he said let’s continue the conversation.  I had worked with organizations like theirs. We had done similar projects where the goals for the organization wer...

There ought to be a place announcing new legal blogs — and it makes all the sense in the world that it be LexBlog. I am not talking about blogs thrown up on websites as a means to improve SEO. I am referring to blogs written in a real and authentic way by someone with an interest in a subject or locale. Someone using their blog to learn, to share their insight with others, to report on the unreported, to network, to advance the law and, at the day, to grow their influence.   You don’t need to worry about SEO and getting found if you blog this way. You’ll get found on search and in 85 other ways that are more important than search. What would be announced? Name of the blog What the blog covers Who publishes the blog Why the blogger is publishing the blog – what’s their angle or interest  Name of their organization, ie, law school, law firm, association, company  Why announce the legal blogs? Shot in the arm to the new blogger. When you start a blog you are b...

I always liked immigration attorney, Greg Siskind ’s mantra that niches lead to riches. Rather than immigration law, Greg blogged, spoke and wrote on niches such as immigration for the healthcare industry or immigration law for professional athletes and teams. I too advocate blogging on a niche. Blogging on subjects like IP litigation by culling cases from your district and circuit court of appeals, employment law for your state, or a particular product or procedure when it came to a plaintiff’s trial lawyer. One 400 ’s Allen Rodriguez raised a good point in a piece this week about niches and lawyers. That being for lawyers to focus on a niche “community” of people, rather than just a niche area of law when developing their practice. I go to a lot of legal conferences and inevitably when speaking with attorneys the question comes up “what’s the focus of your practice?” The response is typically something along the lines of “my niche is estate planning” or “I do family law.” For...

Could I blog every day? I don’t know, I haven’t tried it. Except for the early days of LexBlog, when I blogged as much as a I could, some days more than once, to generate business, I haven’t even come close. Seth Godin, a widely known writer and speaker, got me thinking of daily blogging when he  blogged last week about a collection of daily bloggers who have passed a thousand posts. As Seth says, it only takes three years — or so. Fortunately, there are thousands of generous folks who have been posting their non-commercial blogs regularly, and it’s a habit that produces magic. The magic? Even if no one reads your blog, the act of writing is clarifying, motivating and (eventually) fun. Clairifying. No doubt. I’m convinced that I don’t know what I know until I blog it. More than one LexBlog product has come to fruition by thinking it through in a blog post two. Motivating. Sure. Get something out there and commit to it. Join the conversation among thought leaders in ...

Rather than establish company values for LexBlog, I thought it better to memorialize the values that have guided us over the last fourteen years. In other words, what’s brung us this far together? Over a few days, okay a few months, I gathered my thoughts, shared my thinking and memorialized the values which have guided LexBlog by sharing them in a meeting with my team this summer. Trying to massage the values for the perfect words was only an excuse for not sharing them with you and my teammates in writing by now. Well, here we go. Six values that have guided LexBlog and that I trust will guide us for years to come.  We care, compete, own it, engage, have fun, and stay fit. Care We care for others on our team and for those we are honored to serve. We make a difference in the lives of those working within the legal industry and the public which it serves. Compete We look to achieve a level of professional excellence in all we do, individually and as an organization. ...