Thursday, March 19, 2020

I am a social creature. I get joy in life doing things with other people, particularly helping people.

Heck, when I stumbled into the net twenty-five years ago in the form of AOL, it was the best of both worlds.  Engaging people and helping thousands of people who had questions on personal injury, workers comp, employment and medical malpractice law.

With the coronavirus pandemic, I became isolated with social distancing and was wondering what I could to help – other than stay in doors. What could a legal publishing company do to stem the virus? I was getting a little down.

My team, as they are apt to do, came through – for me, legal professionals and the public – big time. I got a real lift late today when I saw the Coronavirus Legal Daily.

What’s the Coronavirus Legal Daily?

• Daily publication of blog posts from legal professionals providing insight and commentary on legal issues arising out of the pandemic.
• Posts are not just coming from blogs dedicated to the pandemic. The vast majority of posts are coming from blogs focused on other topics which are now writing on pandemic legal matters.
• The posts are curated from among the contributions of 25,000 legal professions whose blog posts are syndicated across the LexBlog Network.
• All posts are displayed with the leading posts featured.
• An email newsletter with updates goes out daily.
• A searchable knowledge base of coronavirus pandemic legal matters.
• In the last twenty-four hours, there were 150 posts on legal matters relating to the pandemic on CV Daily. Kind of amazing.

More than the publication itself and the contributing lawyers, it was the development work done by our team over the last five days, building on top of recent software development, that really gave me a lift.

• We are no longer just looking at river of news, a magazine or blog, but something that looks much higher-end.
• Design has evolved dramatically in the last month. Higher end image treatment and focus on highlights as a draw towards featured content is a huge step forward.
• We have come a long way from LXBN, our old aggregation site, (and even our current LexBlog.com setup).
• Our technology has never been better. Our RSS aggregator has been written from the ground up internally.  Its capability and ability to work with all the issues we encounter with RSS is starting to none.  Starting now, our RSS capability exceeds a company that is dedicated to just doing that on WordPress (https://www.wprssaggregator.com/).  RSS capabilities such as culling relevant posts by words.
• We now have the ability to create topical Portals serving needs such as the pandemic, a need that will never be equaled, in a way that does not require a huge investment on the curation side of things.  This new Portal for the CV Legal Daily made the job of a Portal editor easier and more precise.

My team made tremendous leaps in a very short period. They pushed each other, they cooperated and collaborated. In less than a week, in the name of the pandemic, they put together something that was not “hacky,” but instead has real potential to influence our longer term products.

It was the desire to care, to help and to give meaning to the work of blogging lawyers nation-wide that drove my team. And drove them to create something of meaning in what is unquestionably the greatest challenge of our time.

So an afternoon of feeling a little lonely, just me and my yellow lab, Louis, working from home, I was presented a gift from the team – and not a gift for me, but one for the public and the legal community.

I’ll kick out further details and new plans on the CV Legal Daily over the next week or so.

Do know if you are blogging on the pandemic, no matter the topic of your blog, your posts can be contributed. Just go to the site and sign up. Your blogs RSS feeds will be pulled in and the relevant ones included and featured.