For a legal website to aim for such status, it must go beyond the traditional view of a website as a mere marketing tool for the firm.

By the way, have I commented on how much I like your feeds? Not wiild about the blogroll. You could achieve the same SEO effect for your clients by having the blogroll in a pull down menu.

Any web presence where lawyers are commenting on a topic that relates to their area of practice is marketing. If a law firm built such a creature, sponsored it, and turned on the microphone, so to speak, for authorities in their field, the goodwill and PR value would be significant. Plus any lawyers participating get exposure by engaging in a discussion with other authorities.

Glad to hear you like the feeds. On the blogroll, we try to do the best we can while weighing a whole lot of factors. We'll probably be doing a number of things with the blogroll including labeling it the lexblog network with breaking out non clients to be linked in a separate blogroll, adding a scroll icon on the button, and possibly adding some custom blogrolls via RSS feeds from the upcoming LexMonitor.