Michael Ferguson

The opening day of baseball, three months delayed because of the pandemic, is tomorrow. The New York Yankees will play the World Series Champions, Washington Nationals while the San Francisco Giants visit the Los Angeles Dodgers. In the O’Keefe house, the night before opening day, Sunday in the old days when baseball always started on Monday, meant watching Field of Dreams – and seeing how long it would be before Dad started crying. I don’t recall where I first saw Field of Dreams or whom I was with. I do remember the last time – a couple weeks ago on July 4, on the side of a pole barn building parked in a small grass field on Vashon Island, a ferry ride off Seattle. I made it all the way till Ray’s dad walked out of the corn and asked, “Is this heaven?” before crying this time. Watching the Field of Dreams on the Fourth I couldn’t help but wonder just how many entrepreneurs were guided and inspired by the movie to go forward with their dreams. How many companies were founded an...

I’m in favor of legal blogs covering a niche. Niche blogs become must have reading for people. Doesn’t matter if it’s one hundred, one thousand or ten thousand readers. You have the readers that matter. You also develop a heck of a name in the process. A name not just in the niche subject, but a name as someone who has initiative and who is willing to share helpful information with others. These are must have traits and skills if you’re looking to get a job in the law or build a book of business. Want to get followed and get known today? Publish a blog on what each of the fifty states is doing in regard to their bar exams during the pandemic. It’s all over the board. Some states are requiring applicants to sit for the bar, in person. Some states are postponing the exam – leading to fewer lawyers when we already have an access to legal services problems. Some states are having online exams, which many lawyers are crying foul over. The Montana Supreme Court even overruled an o...

A couple years ago I was sitting in the audience at a legal technology and innovation conference in Amsterdam. With people from all over the world seated around me, it dawned on me just how myopic we can be in the States. Like other companies, I realized I’ve always been measuring LexBlog’s market success and penetration against the U.S. market. But look how shorted this is. The U.S. is not even in the top two countries, by population. The U.S. only represents four percent of the world’s population. 95% of consumers live other than in the United States. Though U.S. purchasing power is higher than other countries, 80% of the purchasing power lies elsewhere. Add to this the greater opportunity for rapid growth in the legal market in other countries. The U.S. has had a robust legal system, including courts and published laws and cases for over a hundred years. Not so in other countries. Technology, where not internationally hindered by governments to curtail social rights and...

Five years ago, sitting out front of a West Hollywood coffee shop, Matt Mullenweg , the co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, the operator of WordPress.com, asked me if I believed the best employees for LexBlog were located within forty miles of our Seattle offices. I didn’t think much of the question, and shrugged Mullenweg off. He was serious though. Automattic was operating without an office, and had employees around the world. Rather than calling employees, remote, Mullenweg called his team a distributed workforce. I’m old school and had always believed an organization’s employees needed to work onsite, “together,” to build a culture, train new employees and be productive. Mullenweg showed me that was not the case. LexBlog has always been partly “distributed.” In addition to our Seattle headquarters, we’ve had full time employees across the country for over a decade. Some we never met before they were hired. But over the last few years we moved to a pretty much all ...

Just write, says marketing guru, author and speaker, Seth Godin. Godin is spot on when it comes to lawyers – and law firms. “ People with writer’s block don’t have a problem typing. They have a problem living with bad writing, imperfect writing, writing that might expose something that they fear. ” And how do you overcome this fear? “ The best way to address this isn’t to wait to be perfect. Because if you wait, you’ll never get there. The best way to deal with it is to write, and to realize that your bad writing isn’t fatal. “ Perfection is the enemy of innovation and business development. Just ask any legal tech entrepreneur or successful CEO. You need to move now and be ready to iterate based on what you learn. I pen blog posts and go back and look at them more closely after I share the posts on social media and see that people are reading them. I occasionally get feedback on grammar and spelling via email and social media. Don’t get me wrong, I proof my copy before I hit...