Michael Ferguson

My COO, Garry Vander Voort’s post yesterday about MySpace’s deleting their user’s archived content should serve as a wake up a call to legal professionals publishing articles and blog posts to third party controlled systems. MySpace announced this week, that in addition to other content, over 50 million music tracks were lost.  How So?  Per MySpace: As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from MySpace. We apologize for the inconvenience. “We apologize for the inconvenience.” More than glib as Vander Voor t describes the statement, it’s more of a “tough luck, what do you expect from us, we’re just one of those Internet companies to whom you pay little or nothing, what more could you expect.” Think companies don’t think that way? Sit in an investors meeting when the projected businesses models didn’t pan out. Your interests and your content will take a back a seat to th

The reason that some law firm IT and legal marketing folks aren’t fans of WordPress is that when they neglect to update it or make ill-advised use of plugins and themes WordPress becomes unsafe. It really is as simple as that. WordPress is one of the most, if not the most, stable, secure and highly performing content management solutions available to law firms, whether it be for a blog, a microsite or a website.  Whether WordPress performs, is secure and stable comes down to its set up, maintenance and feature upgrades. Because of this, most law firms, including the largest law firms, are not running their WordPress sites themselves, they are using a managed WordPress platform or host.  Think of an Indy racing car. Team Penske, perennial favorites at the Indianapolis 500, will be driving three Chevrolet’s this May.  Chevrolet’s? Sounds too simple of a car to win the 500.   Highly performing Chevrolet engines delivering 550 to 700 horsepower capable of propelling cars at an averag

I don’t get word out from the factory floor often enough. I’ll try to do better.  Our tech and development team worked weekends in February to upgrade LexBlog’s managed WordPress platform to PHP 7.2. PHP is a programming and scripting language to create dynamic interactive websites. WordPress is written using PHP as the scripting language. Like WordPress, PHP is also  Open Source and used by countless developers and managed platforms, worldwide.  Why should you and other digital publishers care about our upgrade?  PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0 are officially no longer supported  by the foundation that manages PHP – this means no more updates to those versions making them a huge security hole for people still using those versions. PHP 7.2 provides around a 20-25% performance bump from PHP 7.0  meaning sites will be faster and our servers can handle a greater number of inbound requests. PHP 7.2 includes some nifty security benefits  and as the WordPress core team pushes all of WordPress us

Bob Ambrogi made clear in his talk last week that the future of legal journalism is founded on law blogs.  Law blogs whose content is aggregated and curated by LexBlog into a meaningful network of content and contributors segregated by channel, industries and topics. And which content is distributed via the Web, email and social media.  Rather than these lawyers and law firms hiring public relations and marketing agencies to get them in the news, these law firms and lawyers are creating the news with their niche blog publications. No gate keepers. No relying on reporters whose publications are often behind behind pay walls. If there is any group spending a lot of money PR and marketing while at the same time producing so little journalism in the form of blogging, it’s legal tech companies. The same legal tech companies heavily represented at Ambrogi’s talk on the power of citizen joiyrnalists – just like them. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard from legal tech companies, “W

There are countless criteria that should be considered before filing an employment discrimination lawsuit against your current or former employer.  And before making that decision, it is certainly recommended that you speak with an employment lawyer near you.  However, some of the issues that you should evaluate prior to making that decision include the following: […] Article Source Here: Should I File an Employment Discrimination Lawsuit?