Michael Ferguson

There’s going to come a day when there will be a need to police the speech of legal bloggers. Not across the Internet in entirety, but by a company or organization hosting or syndicating legal blogs. Could be LexBlog. Censorship of legal bloggers has not been a big topic of concern among the legal blogosphere. Sadly, most legal bloggers are afraid to offend anyone, though we have seen a few get bounced off Twitter for a bit, I suspect out of machines doing automatic takedowns.  With legal commentary, most of which will come from blogs, being so critical to the advancement of the law, I’d think “in person” moderation would be much preferable to machines.  The highly successful membership platform, Patreon, that enables publishers to charge subscriptions and bring in as much as six or seven figures a month, provides a nice example of human censorship. The New York Times’ Nellie Bowles reporting  on hate speech censorship by Patreon, details their approach. Patreon ta...

I asked each of my teammates what they wanted for Christmas. Across the board they wanted to brag. To brag about they and their team members did and built in 2018. And what better way to spread their word on what they bragged about to me, in their own words, than on my blog.  Merry Christmas to you and yours and a Happy New Year.  Publishing One of the publishing goals this year was to launch the first phase of a global news and commentary website built on content drawn from legal bloggers worldwide. In September, we pulled the trigger on the first phase of that project. LexBlog.com became the epicenter of an aggregated and curated network of blog content from some 20,000 bloggers, with more joining every day. LexBlog opened its network to the global community of legal bloggers. Any legal blogger is welcome to add a blog to the network, and any reader is free to access the network, with no subscription or payment required. This is a first-of-its-kind network. Operation...

Announcing that you’ve quit Facebook is almost like a badge of honor for folks these days. Many try to recruit others to follow them. I get people leaving Facebook out of “philosophical” concerns, though I think they’ll miss out on a lot by doing so. I don’t understand people quitting Facebook because they found their Facebook News Feed so awful. Afterall, your News Feed is created by your Facebook friends and your engagement with those friends. You choose your friends on Facebook, you share what you want to share and you comment and like at your own pleasure. It’s your friends and your engagement – sharing, likes and comments that drives Facebook algorithms – the algorithms that dictate what you see in your News Feed.  My friend (not on Facebook as he quit) and the founder of Rocket Matter, Larry Port , asked  people to join him in quitting Facebook. He quit, in part, because of his News Feed. I found the toxic politics and the pointless arguments very distressing. I’m ...

WordPress launched its version 5.0, including a total overhaul of its editorial interface via Gutenberg, just ten days.  Since then, WordPress released version 5.0.1 as a security release, as reported by WordPress Tavern’s Sarah Gooding , “with fixes for seven vulnerabilities that were privately disclosed. It includes a few  breaks in backwards compatibility  that plugin developers will want to review.” First updates in a week, and the second to come six days afterwards.  WordPress 5.0.2 will be the first planned followup release to 5.0 and is now scheduled to be released December 19, 2018. Gary Pendergast posted a  summary  of this week’s dev chat that includes the schedule and scope for the upcoming release. It will include Gutenberg 4.7, Twenty Nineteen bug fixes, and a few PHP 7.3 compatibility fixes. No matter how large a company, the talent of their developers or the quality off their testing, when you put software out to a huge number of users u...

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot when your legal publishing company is already struggling in the eyes of a lot of folks. ALM is attempting to stop a couple young legal tech entrepreneurs, one a lawyer and one a technologist, in Sheffield, England from using the term or phrase “LegalTech” in the title of their small legal tech conference, LegalTech Conference North , which was held for the first time last month.  As reported by Dan Bindman of Legal Futures, conference coordinators, Matthew Pennington  and Harvey Harding received a “cease and desist” letter from ALM telling them that their use of “LegalTech” in their conference name was in violation of ALM’s trademark.  From Bindman: According to the Intellectual Property Office, the UK trade mark covers: “Conducting and organizing exhibitions, trade shows, conferences and workshops for public and private organizations, companies, lawyers and law firms for the purpose of exhibiting technical products and se...

Over twenty years ago I read of the power of virtual communities in Net Gain, Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities by John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong (now executive director of Debevoise &Plimpton). I read  Net Gain  then while creating Prairielaw.com, a virtual law community of lawyers and lay people alike, later sold to LexisNexis. I am reading Net Gain again as LexBlog’s worldwide legal blogging network begins to pick up steam. This legal blogging network is every bit a virtual community of: Blogging legal professionals Those supporting these legal bloggers – LexBlog and its partners Those whom benefit from the legal information and commentary of legal bloggers, including legal professionals, consumers of legal services empowered by legal blogs to select a lawyer in a more informed fashion, and other publishers who receive blog commentary by syndication. No question there is a business model in organizing a legal blogging community, so long as the f...

Watching WordPress cofounder, Matt Mullenweg  deliver his annual State of the Word at WordCamp US on Saturday afternoon from Nashville there was little question that Gutenberg is the future of legal publishing. Beginning with the WordPress text editor (unchanged for a decade till now) released this week with WordPress 5.0, Gutenberg will ultimately impact the entire publishing experience, including customization of our publications.  Gutenberg will empower lawyers, law firms, law students, law professors, and organizations throughout our legal profession to do everything, and more, that traditional publishers have done. A law firm, law school or court could take control of their own publishing on WordPress based platforms and out perform the likes of Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis and Bloomberg. Gutenberg delivers a “block” publishing experiencing that enables users you to create as rich a post layout as one can can imagine and even build their own themes. WordPress develope...

A campaign got underway today to grow LexBlog’s Worldwide Legal Blogging Community.  This morning, two members of LexBlog’s publishing team began reaching out to legal bloggers in the United States whose blogs are not already in LexBlog’s legal news and commentary network.  LexBlog announced a few months ago the launch of a first of its kind legal news and commentary network delivering timely and targeted articles from legal bloggers, worldwide. At no cost, legal bloggers could have their blog posts included in legal news reporting and syndication as well as have a personal profile with archives of their blog posts on LexBlog. The organic growth of new bloggers who joined without prompting or invitation has been impressive with the community growing from 17,000 bloggers who were already publishing on LexBlog’s publishing software solution to close to 19,000 bloggers.  The task of reaching out to bloggers is not a simple one. Over the last month, our team reviewed ove...

As part of it’s annual recognition of legal blogs, the ABA Journal recognized what we in the legal blogging community have known for years. This being that legal bloggers can cover niches in the law better than traditional legal reporters and publishers.  From Sarah Mui , Copy Editor and eight years year veteran of the Journal: Great legal blogs go deeper into practice niches than the mainstream legal press and share well-written personal insights.  It’s true. How can a reporter, journalist or writer match a practicing lawyer who is staying abreast of developments in their area of law, whether on a state or national basis? There are far too many niches. And too much expertise, too much passion and too much desire to breakout as a leader in their field in lawyers from coast to coast. Practicing lawyers familiar with talking with the press know the frustration of one line being pulled from a lengthy conversation when the reporter is also talking with a lawyer taking the ...