Michael Ferguson

Veteran Supreme Court reporter, Linda Greenhouse , asked in a New York Times column this last weekend, “ How Did a Young, Unknown Lawyer Change the World? ” “ I’ve been asked repeatedly in recent days to explain Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s accomplishment: How did she, a young unknown lawyer, starting basically from scratch, persuade the nine men of the Supreme Court to join her in constructing a new jurisprudence of sex equality? I replied that she had a project, a goal from which she never deviated during her long career. It was to have not only the Constitution but also society itself understand men and women as equal. Fair enough, as far as that explanation goes. But I think it misses something deeper about Justice Ginsburg, who died last Friday at 87. What she had, in addition to passion, skill and a field marshal’s sense of strategy, was imagination. She envisioned a world different from the one she had grown up in, a better world in which gender was no obstacle to women’...

I read, via a blog post from Rick Georges, that a Fastcase 7 update includes what Georges calls a “brief bank” for lawyers. Got me thinking of a law blog bank. As way of background, brief banks enable lawyers to get their hands on relevant briefs and memorandums that another lawyer has prepared and filed with the court. Not only saves a lawyer time, but gives them insight into another lawyer’s thinking and analysis. As a practicing lawyer, we had a brief bank available to state lawyer association members. It had few, if any, relevant briefs. And it took a couple weeks to get your hands on them. Fastcase buys Docket Alarm , which then practicing attorney Michael Sander created. Docket Alarm could monitor court dockets and make available relevant court filings – including briefs and memorandums. An instant brief bank on steroids. An aggregation of all credible law blogs provides much the same value. A lawyer is working on an issue and looking for the current insight and analysi...

I noticed today that veteran legal blogger, Bob Ambrogi added a resource section to his LawSites Blog. Called, LawSitesResources.com , this resource section is a frequently changing collection of white papers, e-books and other resources, all available at no cost. The section currently lists twenty different resources, covering topics that range from CCPA compliance to data privacy to the law firm of tomorrow. For example, this week’s featured resource for family lawyers and family law professionals is a free report,  How Parenting Plans Are Being Modified During COVID . Ambrogi, blogging on legal technology matters for almost eighteen years, has a good sized audience of lawyers, other legal professionals and legal tech companies. His audience is likely to have an interest in the items shared, the particular items varying based on their interests. Items at LawSitesResources.com are sponsored by the companies that produced them and generate revenue for LawSites. You would no...

Thirty some years ago, as a practicing lawyer, I’d receive a carbon copy of a lawyer referral slip from the State Bar of Wisconsin. Someone from the La Crosse area had contacted the State Bar, via a toll free number displayed in the yellow pages, asking for a referral to a local lawyer. I was on the referral list for matters in which I had no deep expertise. Being I was next up on the list, my name, with nothing on my background nor expertise, was given to the person who called the Bar. The carbon copy was forwarded to me so I knew that if the person contacted me, I was to pay ten percent of my fee to the Bar. With some flaws, it was not a bad way to connect people with lawyers in a state – thirty or sixty years ago. Like everything, the Internet has changed how people find a lawyer. Unfortunately, websites and directories, aren’t doing a great job in connecting people with lawyers. 85% of people, regardless of whether they have the financial resources or not, don’t contact a la...

Getting the influencers to write about you and your newly launched law blog is usually overlooked by lawyers and legal marketing professional. Ironically, as I explained to a couple law firms this last week, it’s not that hard to get the influencers to do so Influencers are those people who influence your audience of clients, prospective clients, referral sources and association leaders when it comes to taking notice of you and your blog. Influencers include mainstream media, trade media, bloggers and social media users who cover and discuss matters in the niche upon which you are or will be blogging. Influencers by definition are those with a decent sized audience, and whom are viewed by their audience as a credible source of news, information, insight and commentary. In the early days of blogging, lawyers launching blogs often contacted other bloggers and the media announcing the launch of their blog. Occasionally it worked to get some publicity. Most of the time, not. Today, ...

There’s a lesson to be learned by lawyers from blogging’s beginnings. It’s in not over complicating things. Blog is an abbreviation of the term, “weblog,” a website where people logged their browsing activity on the web. Almost in a diary like fashion. Publishers of weblogs logged their activity. Where they want, the url, what they saw and offered their take. Posts were displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent posts appeared first – at the top of the web page. A social or networking aspect arose in a few ways. First, publishers of a weblog cited the source of their post, often another weblog, and the publisher of the that site. Through technology called a “trackback” weblog publishers, becoming known as bloggers, received a notice on their blog that they had been cited (linked to). Second, bloggers kept a folder for vanity feeds, in their RSS readers. Doing so, bloggers could see who cited them and their blog. Third, comments to a blog post, somethin...

Many of you don’t know Dan Schwartz , a Connecticut lawyer and publisher of the Connecticut Employment Law Blog . I know Dan as a friend, having first met him in Montreal thirteen years ago. I’ve gotten to know his caring family, and him, mine, through Facebook. So it gave me goosebumps (I get emotional, easily) when I read what Dan shared on LinkedIn this morning. “ Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint when certain life events have a big impact on your career. For me, one of the biggest of them is actually easy to spot. It was 13 years ago this week that I started a blog on employment law. A few months prior, I had met Kevin O’Keefe at a young lawyers conference for the ABA in, of all places, Montreal. I worked with his then-skeleton crew at LexBlog, Inc. and it’s all history from there. So why has something as small as a blog had such an impact? Lots of reasons: The doors it has opened to meeting others. The continual focus on staying relevant. The impact it has had on my writing...

Too many blogging lawyers report the law, rather than share an interpretation of the law. At the same time, it’s the interpretation of the law – what the law means to them – that blog readers are looking for. When it comes down to it, any second year law student can report the law. They’ve done plenty of it already in law school. You can also hire people who are not lawyers to write your legal blog posts. Other lawyers hire lawyers who are not practicing and have no expertise in the niche to write their blog posts. Sadly, too many lawyers do. Darryl Cross , well known for his work in helping business leaders develop high performing teams, commenting on a recent post of mine , shared: “ The biggest pivot lawyers need to make is going from “here is what the law says” to “here is what I PERSONALLY think it means to you”. It is a watershed moment that anyone can do—-if they have the courage to do so. And they should. Take a stand, have a point of view, and you will have a great blog. ...

I try my best to share each of my blog posts on LinkedIn. As Jeff Nowak, publisher of FMLA Insights , shared recently, writing a blog post and not sharing it on LinkedIn is like hitting a home run and stopping at first base. I don’t just share a link, I share the whole post in the space provided. If the copy won’t fit – most posts will not – I shorten the post up. Bottom line, I give LinkedIn users everything they need to get the point. It does not matter one bit if readers do not come to my blog. Like you, I’m not selling shorts or chocolate, I don’t need people to come to my site to buy something. Again like you, I’m blogging to demonstrate my skill and build relationships. Plus, folks don’t have the time to leave a social media site and visit another site to read an article. Today was the perfect example of how easy it is to network by sharing a post on LinkedIn. I penned a post yesterday on how easy it is for blogging lawyers to get found By potential clients. The post took ...

It’s regularly said that people and businesses hire lawyers, not law firms. This played today in an interview by Practical Law The Journal: Litigation of Linda Lu , Senior Vice President & Deputy General Counsel at TransUnion. TransUnion’s Legal & Compliance department has approximately 200 associate lawyers. Lu is Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel. Lu was asked, “ What three things does a law firm need to do to impress you? “ Lu said she wasn’t looking at the law firm, she’s looking at individual lawyers. “ To impress me, a lawyer should: Provide practical legal and business-oriented advice. Be a trusted advisor who my company and I can rely on to have our backs and who makes my life easier (including by appreciating how my success is measured and the limits of my time and resources). Communicate articulately and succinctly .” Provide practical advice, be trusted a advisor and communicate articulately and succinctly. Talk to the good legal bloggers...

Last Thursday, a friend asked me to find a lawyer for them or to get a referral from a lawyer so they could get counsel on a niche legal issue in a large metro area in another state. No matter what anyone tells you, locating the right lawyer is not easy, and usually comes via relationships. So I reached out to a lawyer I knew in that metro area to see if they knew of such a lawyer or knew of a lawyer who may. No luck. As way of context, lawyers get work by referring work to other lawyers, it builds a network. Any lawyer would be glad to take my call asking for a referral to another lawyer. And that lawyer would be glad to take the call of any lawyer in their community asking for the same thing. It’s how they get referrals – by referring work out. When I came up empty on a referral, fortunately I knew the name of NAELA (National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys), an association of attorneys who are experienced and trained in working with the legal problems of older Americans and in...

I was on call last week with the marketing director of a midsize law firm which is publishing four legal blogs. The firm’s CFO questioned the value of the blogs. How much time were the firm’s lawyers putting into the blogs – and in turn, how much business was being generated by the blogging? Legitimate questions as the ROI of legal blogging should be measured in terns of revenue. In the case of this firm, the ROI was not there. The marketing director and CFO thought generating more traffic to the blogs and in turn their website – through search performance and other means – was the answer. My question was how did the firm generate its work over the years, it’s a good firm. The answer was relationships between the firm’s lawyers, referral sources, the business community, potential clients and existing clients. Relationships, combined with the lawyers having strong names as authorities in their respective fields. I explained that traffic, alone, to blogs and the website is much ak...