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LexBlog Christmas Presents?

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.

Operations

After years in our own office, we finished our first full year at the WeWork Holyoke Building location in Seattle. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed working in a space filled with other motivated entrepreneurs and their companies.

Another source of excitement this year came as we welcomed some new team members that make every day at LexBlog even more innovative – Welcome, Melissa, Caroline, Jaime, and Chris.

Product

One of the great triumphs of our Product Team in 2018 was a relaunched LexBlog.com with new custom-built aggregation and syndication engine, allowing our platform to aggregate blog content from any source, regardless of whether the blog is hosted by LexBlog’s WordPress-based blogging platform, or externally on any other platform.

Back in November, our lead developer, Scott Fennell, had the opportunity to speak at WordCamp in Portland, Maine on managing third-party solution relationships. You can read more about Scott’s experience at WordCamp Maine 2018 in his Donuts blog post.

Marketing

In promotion of the opening of the LexBlog network to a global community of legal bloggers, our Marketing Team launched a national campaign to provide greater access to legal services at the Clio Cloud Conference in October. Showcasing the gap in trust between consumers and lawyers, we utilized this campaign to show how blogging is instrumental to changing that precedent, encouraging legal bloggers to join our network.

The Marketing Team collaborated with Publishing to create Legal Tech Founders, an online publication focused on legal technology entrepreneurs and the lessons they have learned as they build their startups. We organized over 25 on-site interviews at three of the largest legal technology conferences in the world over the past five months.

Design

The Design Team collaborated with the Product and Marketing teams to revamp any outdated branding, implementing a uniform, updated LexBlog brand across our platform and online presence.

Another goal we accomplished this year made significant UX/UI improvements to the LexBlog platform, enabling for easier site customization for our users. We launched a beta with a state bar, utilizing the new customization features to create websites as a member benefit for lawyers.

Sales

One of the products we worked to develop over the past year was our microsites. Our team brought an addition of ten sites by six different firms over the last few months. You can find an example of one that our Design Team created for Winstead Business Divorce.

Another project we enjoyed this year was creating LexBlog’s first website built for a client specifically for event marketing with BakerHostetler. You can check out the site for the Genesis Blockchain Summit in October 2018.

Customer Success

Our team is happy to report that we helped retire our outdated legacy MT3/MT4 platforms and upgraded our clients to modern, responsive websites. One example of this can be found on the Food Safety News publication – check it out on desktop or mobile. 

We’ve also had a lot of satisfied customers this year – our monthly customer satisfaction rate fluctuated between 94-100%. We’re excited to make it even better in 2019.

Me

I am just grateful for the incredible honor and privilege of getting to work with and to lead a team with people as talented, passionate and caring as these folks – and to have the opportunity of making a small dent in making the legal profession a better place for lawyers, the many other legal professionals and the people they all serve.

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