Doing some research yesterday afternoon I pulled up a blog post of mine from a few years ago. As is often the case, the post cited a third-party resource and contained the appropriate link to the resource.

The resource I was looking for was a survey conducted by the American Bar Association Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services.

Click on the word “survey” and you’ll see the link is dead. The ABA has taken the survey down or, more likely, redesigned their website without keeping the site architecture intact so as to retain the existing url structure and the validity of incoming links.

I shared on Twitter:

To which Dennis Garcia, Assistant General Counsel at Microsoft, responded:

Garcia, an established leader in technology and innovation in the legal industry, regularly writes for widely read third-party publications.

In addition to legal professionals citing his writings in their blogs, articles and on social media, Garcia is building a personal and professional legacy in his writings. His influence is growing.

Our Twitter discussion continued with my comment.

Feeling insecure that no will otherwise see their content, lawyers and law firms are apt to have their content published on third-party sites – both news sites and content distribution platforms.

The problem comes with the long term visibility and url structure of the content.

Business models of publishers change. Medium has gone through about three and is still not clear on their long term business model.

Companies get acquired with the aquirer changing things up or eliminating most of the product acquired altogether.

More than one current legal blogger has complained that their contributions to ALM, owner of Law.com, originally free and open on the web, have now been placed behind a paywall pursuant to a business deal between ALM and LexisNexis.

Two problems there. One, people cannot find this content any longer (was only written for ALM, not the lawyer’s blog) and all of the links citing their commentary are now dead.

Two, links from blogs, articles and social media are important, they are an objective measure of a lawyer’s influence in their field. Take those links away and you take away their influence.

Seems the long term answer is to publish on a platform that you can control. One where you own the domain, the content and the domain mapping for the content should you ever want to migrate the content. 

Getting your content back, alone, without the original url structure, as would be the case with making the third-party poublisher the host of your content, will not cut it. All of the incoming links are dead and you’re starting over from scratch.

Sure, syndicate the content to other places to increase visibility and delivery to a focused audience, just like you syndicate your content through social media, but make your place – your blog or site – the primary site.

When syndicating to third party sites, ask that that your content reference that the piece was originally published on your site or blog. That’ll signal your blog or website as the primary site.

Digital publishing, especially by individuals, is new, this learning process for each of us as to what’s important is only natural.

Come January, I’ll have been a member of LinkedIn for fifteen years. I’ve made over 13,000 connections during this time.

I don’t share this to impress you, but to impress upon you the impact of one simple habit of mine. That being to pen a personal note to the person to whom I asked to connect on LinkedIn and to the person whose request to connect I accepted.

Sure there may have been a few I misssed, but I am certain I hit 95% or more. That’s over 10,000 notes, brief as they were. 

Why did I do it? 

There sure wasn’t a LinkedIn protocol. No one was holding themselves out as an expert on how to use LinkedIn. Today’s new lawyers hadn’t any use for LinkeIn back then, they were in the sixth grade.

I sent the personal notes because I thought it the right thing to do. The polite thing to do.

How could I send out my first request to connect, something I was reluctant to do, without a note attached introducing myself and telling the person why I was asking to connect.

In that case it was a fellow Notre Dame grad, who I believe was general counsel of Coke. I told him I never sent out such a request, that I was a fellow alumnus and was curious how this LinkedIn thing worked.

He responded inside of twenty minutes, thanking me for my request to connect, asking me to visit sometime when I was in the area and wished me and my family a “Happy Easter Weekend.”

I would have felt like a stooge if I just hit the “connect” button and fired off to him a request to connect. Who was I? Why was I asking to connect?

Why not just knock on my office door and say, “My name is Dick Smith, here’s my Rolodex card and nice to shake your hand?” Or just call someone and say “This machine I have on my desk prompted me to call you unananouced and without introduction ask you to look at my Rolodex card.”

I get that there are cases when you just jumped out of a meeting or off a call when you each know each other that clicking the “connect” may be okay. But even then, what’s so hard about saying good meeting, good call etc.

LinkedIn has all the tools built in for a personal note to accompany your request to connect. Accepting a request connect even prompts you to drop them a note.

Minneapolis businessman and author, Harvey Mackay penned a book in 1999 entitled ‘Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty.’ Billed as the only networking book that you’ll ever need, the book served as a reminder to me to build a network before I need it.

A network on LinkedIn means more than idle connections, such a network means people knowing, or at least maybe remembering, each other. Enough to cause engagement.

Engagement in the form of exchanges at the time of the connection. Engagement that comes as a result of LinkedIn’s social algorithms putting relevant news and information in front of each of us – causing mutual likes, comments and shares. And face to face engagement that’s the result of such earlier engagement.

Digging your well when you need it may be too late. Dig your well now by just being polite. 

Being the director of career services is not an easy job at most law schools today. 

Assuming you’re not working at a top tier law school, you have more grads than jobs. Combine that with declining budgets at many law schools leaving you understaffed.

Despite the challenges, career services directors have one thing their predecessors never had, the Internet.

Networking through the Internet for building out the reputation of the school, nurturing relationships with potential employers, connecting with bloggers and traditional reporters so they’ll be writing about your school and its grads and learning what it takes to succeeed today by networking with leaders in the industry.

Networking through the Internet requires strategic and effective use of Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and a blog.

Not by someone in the career services’ office or a communications’ person working for the law school. But by the director of career services networking in a real and authentic fashion in their own voice. 

It’s a common refrain that I don’t have time to learn and use social media. The fact is that the effective use of technology, the Internet for networking included, saves you time — at least as measured by the bottom line of employing more grads.

I raise this as just read of a law school’s announcing a new director of career services. I was going to share word of the announcement on Twitter, but couldn’t because the person did not have a Twitter account. I always attribute news to and about people and include their Twitter account.

With all the current and past law school deans, professors and career services professionals networking through the net, how could this person, with a fiduciary duty to serve their school’s grads, opt out as to the Internet? How could the dean of the law school hire the person for such a job?

The day has passed when it’s cute and professionally acceptable to say, “I don’t use social media,”or naively quip, “there is more harm than good that can come from social media.”

Law school career services directors have the obligation to lead. Set an example for their students by showing them how you get ahead in life today by harnessing the power of the Internet. Even hold classes and programs on effective networking through the net for learning and building a personal brand.

It’s not acceptable to have grads of some law schools getting jobs because they learned networking through the net through the tutelage of their school’s career services director while students at other schools have never heard of the concept. Sadly, I have found the later group of students to be the majority.

Running a law school is no easy task, but launching an initiative to teach students to network through the net can start now – next semester. Careeer services can be part of the initiative, learning right along side the students – it’s okay to be vulnerable.

Not only will you be fulfilling your fiduciary obligation to your students, but you’ll be growing the name of the law school.

The impact of a school’s students being out on the net in an effective and professional way has a far greater positive impact on the school’s brand than the school’s marketing and communications’ effort.

What are you waiting for? It’s not nearly as hard as you think — and you owe it to your students. 

LinkedIn is becoming much more like Facebook – and that’s a good thing for lawyers looking to build relationships and a reputation.

Facebook has always been a place to share professional and personal items, stay abreast of news and information and to engage each other through likes and comments as well as messages through Facebook Messenger.

The Facebook algorithms work overtime to put in front of you the posts and people you want to see. This results in networking on steroids both on Facebook and offline with just the audience you want to be hanging out with, professionally and personally.

LinkedIn has been more a close to the vest, stodgy, business connection/Rolodex world.

When people shared items on LinkedIn, especially lawyers and law firms, it wasn’t really sharing, it was pushing content at people that they were not seeing otherwise. An eyeballs kind of thing. Enough so that content syndication companies automatically “syndicated” legal content through LinkedIn for law firms that couldn’t keep up with doing so on their own.

This is changing in a couple ways. First I am seeing more social sharing of news and events on LinkedIn. Some real passion and excitement behind legal professionals sharing pictures from conferences and events.

Such posts are drawing a lot of comments  and likes. Any regular social media user knows the secret to relationships is those comments and likes – the getting to know, the bonding, and the ensuing engagement online and offline.

Heck, a photo of a group of us out to dinner in Boston shared on LinkedIn by Niki Black of MyCase, has drawn over a hundred likes and comments. Again, it’s not the love people are after but any ensuing engagment that my flow from such activity.

I am also seeing legal professionals share news and information in a real and authentic way in their LinkedIn status update. 

Blog posts of their own with a personalized introduction, posts of others, information and news. As in the first case, comments, likes and shares are following at a good clip.

No question that LinkedIn’s social algorithms are improving. Having the right stuff from the right people land in front of us at the right time is no accident. Neither is the feeling we get to engage in this community discussion.

LinkedIn’s social algorithms are no where near as good as Facebook’s, but the fact they are driving participation and engagement is great to see. 

Know that you get what you put into social media, especially when it comes to making the social algorithms work for you. 

Liberally sharing details on your personal and professional background in the biographical interfaces on social media sites and regularly connecting, sharing, liking and commenting lets the machines know more about you, what you’d like to see and who you’d like to meet and engage with. A much more rewarding experience that will keep you using the social medium.

Bottom line, about eight in ten people of all ages and demographics use social media to engage each other. Seeing the socializing aspect of social media grow on LinkedIn is good news for all legal professionals – especially for those who fear other social media for professional growth and interaction.

Yesterday, our tech and products team greenlighted our going to market with a new product for the syndication of legal blog posts from the LexBlog news and commentary platform.

If this were a story from a business school textbook or a large company, I might share how we studied the market, looked at production costs, analyzed pricing and surveyed potential customers.

But I don’t believe that takes place in small entrepreneurial companies. I know it doesn’t take place at LexBlog.

This product came about from a dinner conversation at a conference with someone I had never met before. 

After social conversation, he shared a challenge he was having. He wasn’t sure that he and his organization were taking the right approach. When he asked my opinion we got into a discussion of what if it did this or that? A half hour later he said let’s continue the conversation. 

I had worked with organizations like theirs. We had done similar projects where the goals for the organization were similar. I had been stewing about a product that could do what we discussed. The product was something that I considered for a long time as an offshoot of the LexBlog news platform. I had a feel for how to price it. 

So there was “something there” in my mind. 

I get back to Seattle and, as usual, I’m all ginned up about this new product that we ought to be able to deliver in two or three months. Easy for me to say in that I don’t have to build something (leveraging our existing technology and platform) in a way that it will scale, prepare educational documents, price it right, support it, and be able to deliver it time and again.

Rightfully so, LexBlog tech and products wanted to clearly understand the goals, what’s the definition of success for us and our customer, what features would it need to include, what other customers might demand and more.

Products also went out and met with this potential first customer and their team. Wise move to nurture relationships among folks who were going to work on and deploy a first of its kind solution. We picked up some required features we would have missed from team members of the potential customer who were not in earlier discussions.

Then we had some “interesting” meetings in Seattle about how to do the development, how it would affect our product roadmap, and when we (I) could have this product to sell.

No matter how frustrated I may get at times, I have great teammates on the products, tech and operations side. They worked on this (and me) for months in order to come up with a deliverable and the timing for it.

Yesterday that green light came and it was pretty darn exciting. I was on the phone to two organizations telling them – one, I’m sorry that I couldn’t deliver as fast as I first thought and two, that we’re ready to move forward.

We’re not totally out of the woods yet. I know from experience with my team that this product will perform well and have tremendous customer support.

We just need to go through the project cycle to document processes, identify potential tech issues, work through education and support materials, and I am sure eighteen other things that I would glance over.

But from a dinner in January to a product we’re moving to market in November, that’s how a legal tech product gets developed at LexBlog.

There ought to be a place announcing new legal blogs — and it makes all the sense in the world that it be LexBlog.

I am not talking about blogs thrown up on websites as a means of improving SEO, often with ghostwritten content. 

I am referring to blogs written in a real and authentic way by someone with an interest in a subject and/or locale. Someone using their blog to learn, to share their insight with others, to report on the unreported, to network, to advance the law and, at the day, to grow their influence.

You don’t need to worry about SEO and getting found if you blog this way. You’ll get found on search and in 85 other ways that are equally as important.

What would be announced?

  • Name of the blog
  • What the blog covers
  • Who publishes the blog
  • Why the blogger is publishing the blog – what’s their angle or interest 
  • Name of their organization, ie, law school, law firm, association, company 

Why announce legal blogs?

  • Shot in the arm to the new blogger. When you start a blog you are blogging to an audience of one. A call out from a place like LexBlog with likely follow on welcomes and congrats from others that saw the announcement would be good inspiration.
  • Help build our worldwide community of legal bloggers. The community is loose knit now, to say the least. Announcing new bloggers and blogs would foster relationships based on common interests and locales and grow the community and “sub-communities” of which LexBlog acts as a hub.
  • Discovery of new blogs for witch to subscribe. Announcing new bloggers each week would be widely followed by legal bloggers, worldwide, as well as other legal professionals. They would subscribe to new blogs of interest via RSS and email updates. 
  • Get more legal professionals blogging. Blogging is not hard and it’s certainly not what many people think it is. Seeing other legal professionals starting to blog will inspire others to start – and even give “wannabe” bloggers people to call and ask, “what’s this all about? How did you get started?”
  • Shows the topics and locales being covered. That’ll inspire legal professionals to see openings for them. 

How do we get this done? It shouldn’t be hard, but there are some hurdles. Though Harvard Innovation Lab’s Caselaw Access Project which digitized 40 million pages of case law makes any hurdles we have seem trivial.

We need to know of the new blogs. The onus is on us at LexBlog first, not the new bloggers.

LexBlog needs to feel and actually be the center of the universe for all legal blogs – the platform of record for indexing and syndicating all legal blog content, if you will.

We’ve starting work on this by opening LexBlog’s legal news and commentary platform to all legal blogs, no matter whether they are running on our publishing solution or not.

We now need to go get all existing legitimate law blogs on the platform. Firm by firm, lawyer by lawyer and blog by blog. Passion and persistence on our part.

We need to start sharing on a regular basis the new legal blogs on LexBlog. They may not be new bloggers, but it’ll help existing legal bloggers recognize LexBlog’s stature and motivate them to register their blog with LexBlog.

And, of course we need to start energizing LexBlog, as a news and commentary site, by harnessing the passion, ideas and drive of  journalists.

It wasn’t that long ago — okay, 14 years, — when I singled out new blogs. Bob Ambrogi and Carolyn Elefant did the same with a law blog round for ALM and the ABA Journal Journal did their part by indexing legal blogs.

But legal blogging has come of age. 17,000 legal professionals are publishing on the LexBlog platform alone, tens of thousands elsewhere, and 4,500 legal blogs in the States alone.

Time to start bringing this community of legal bloggers together and doing something as polite as announcing new legal bloggers.

I always liked immigration attorney, Greg Siskind’s mantra that niches lead to riches.

Rather than immigration law, Greg blogged, spoke and wrote on niches such as immigration for the healthcare industry or immigration law for professional athletes and teams.

I too advocate blogging on a niche. Blogging on subjects like IP litigation by culling cases from your district and circuit court of appeals, employment law for your state, or a particular product or procedure when it came to a plaintiff’s trial lawyer.

One 400’s Allen Rodriguez raised a good point in a piece this week about niches and lawyers.

That being for lawyers to focus on a niche “community” of people, rather than just a niche area of law when developing their practice.

I go to a lot of legal conferences and inevitably when speaking with attorneys the question comes up “what’s the focus of your practice?” The response is typically something along the lines of “my niche is estate planning” or “I do family law.” For decades a niche was really just a practice focus instead of say a smaller town general practitioner. Well, for decades that was perfectly fine.

Not anymore, per Rodriguez.

Competition is rampant, not only from other lawyers, but from alternative legal services providers, ala LegalZoom. General niche areas of law will not cut it.

More importantly is that lawyers cannot expect the consumer of legal services to shop for a lawyer by a niche area of the law.

…[T]he modern small business owner gets pulled in many directions and manages more than they may have had to in the past. Because of this limited time when it comes to dealing with legal issues, they don’t want to have to continually shop for the right person to hire for a given problem. Instead, they want a single solution producer, for the various legal matters they may have to deal with.

Imagine the small business owner that has to deal with a landlord tenant matter one day, a trademark issue the next and contractor issue the following week. For most attorneys that focus on one or two areas, they may have to refer this person out, or risk losing the client to a full service firm. Instead, what law firms should be considering is who specifically is the audience that they wish to serve and creating a niche around them specifically.

The key, per Rodriguez, is to develop a niche serving a group of like minded individuals (e.g., creators, equestrian owners, realtors, software developers, cannabis distributors, etc.).

The modern law firm niche is not a practice area, but a decision to serve a particular community of people. The modern lawyer is likely to be a part of that community and serve the role as trusted advisor.

Rodriguez’ point is also a good one when it comes to blogging.

I think of Dallas Attorney, Allison Rowe, who achieved rockstar status when, as a young lawyer, she jumped out of corporate litigation into something she loved, equine law. A love she had and a people she know from growing up around horses.

Publishing the Equine Law Blog (no longer being updated, yet remains a reputation enhancer) got her speaking to the National Breeders Association at Churchill Downs — inside of a year of launching her blog.

I think of Attorney David Donoghue’s blog on Retail Patent Litigation. As a follow on to his Chicago IP Litigation Blog detailing IP cases from the district court and circuit court of appeals, Donoghue establishes himself as a trusted advisor to the retail industry (a huge one) on IP issues (still a huge community within retail).

Geography is also in play as far as a “community” for lawyers in smaller communities. A lawyer blogging on a niche area of the law or even law in general can establish an awful lot of trust in a community of fifty to one-hundred thousand. Add Facebook and you have more of a winner.

Blogging to a “community” enables you to blog about community events and conferences, to reference in your blog the influencers of the community and what they are writing about and being quoted on, to report news of interest to the community and to feature/interview community leaders.

Within a year, two at the most, you’ll be invited to speak at events, widely quoted and seen as a trusted authority and advisor.

Blogging and networking through the net enables to widen the scope of your “community” as so darn few lawyers are willing to get out where people are – online – and engage in a down to earth fashion. Getting out with people online by blogging and using social media sets you apart and enables you to achieve trusted advisor status.

Communities are fun socially as well. You get to know people as people, as opposed to target clients for whom you feel pressure to get their work.

Out for for drinks and dinner. Talking about family. Sharing recreational interests. It’s the stuff life is made of – and the stuff business is made of via relationships.

Good food for thought here. Look around LexBlog for the community focus of blogging lawyers. Success leaves clues.

Could I blog every day? I don’t know, I haven’t tried it.

Except for the early days of LexBlog, when I blogged as much as a I could, some days more than once, to generate business, I haven’t even come close.

Seth Godin, a widely known writer and speaker, got me thinking of daily blogging when he blogged last week about a collection of daily bloggers who have passed a thousand posts. As Seth says, it only takes three years — or so.

Fortunately, there are thousands of generous folks who have been posting their non-commercial blogs regularly, and it’s a habit that produces magic.

The magic?

Even if no one reads your blog, the act of writing is clarifying, motivating and (eventually) fun.

Clairifying. No doubt.

I’m convinced that I don’t know what I know until I blog it. More than one LexBlog product has come to fruition by thinking it through in a blog post or two.

Motivating. Sure.

Get something out there and commit to it. Join the conversation among thought leaders in your field and feel the urge to stay at the top of your game. Feel the desire to want to share in a way that helps others.

And fun? Yep.

When I don’t blog, I miss it. Sure, there are days when other things seem more pressing, And there are days when travel absorbs me.

But with every blog post brings some quite time, a little thinking and invariably someone I connect with.

Scott Greenfield (more than a post a day and whose well-being I worry about when he misses a day), Dan Harris (China law brought to you daily by he and his firm for over a decade) and Bob Ambrogi (after 15 years, blogging each weekday) add value to our lives, not only with their whit and insight, but as role models that it can be done – you can make a difference though blogging.

Almost two and a half years ago, I started running every day. I’m not to a thousand days yet, I’ll get there next March.

I didn’t set out to run a thousand days in a row. I didn’t have any target in mind, except to see what it would be like to run every morning  – a time of day I was not particularly fond of for running.

Running about three or four days a week, sometimes less, at the time, going every day was going to be a stretch.

But time for quite thinking, getting in shape, maybe eating better, feeling a sense of accomplishment and getting my dog out with me were all reasons for daily running.

A little to my surprise, after a few months, running every morning became a daily routine — that produced some magic — as Seth says, clarifying, motivating and fun.

How long before blogging becomes a daily routine? Per Seth:

What I’ve found is this–after people get to posting #200 or beyond, they uniformly report that they’re glad they did it. Give it a try for three or four months and see what happens…

Could I get to #200 or beyond? I’ll let you know when I do – that is, start.

Rather than establish company values for LexBlog, I thought it better to memorialize the values that have guided us over the last fourteen years.

In other words, what’s brung us this far together?

Over a few days, okay a few months, I gathered my thoughts, sought feedback and memorialized our values by sharing them in a meeting with my team this summer.

Trying to massage the values for the perfect words the last month or two was only an excuse for not sharing them with you and my teammates in writing by now.

Well, here we go. Six values that have guided LexBlog and that I trust will guide us for years to come. 

We care, we compete, we own it, we engage, we have fun, and we stay fit.

Care

  • We care for others on our team and for those we are honored to serve.
  • We make a difference in the lives of those working within the legal industry and the public which it serves.

Compete

  • We look to achieve a level of professional excellence in all we do, individually and as an organization.
  • Being the best does not stand in the way of moving forward.

Own it

As an entrepreneurial organization we define the work required to be done in our role. We look for resources and ideas, but do not look for others to do our work. 

Engage

Engagement online and offline is essential to learning, establishing trust, building relationships, and realizing one’s potential and dreams.

Have fun

Fun and competition to achieve a level of professional excellence are not mutually exclusive – they run hand in hand. Nothing is more fun than measuring success by the number of people we help.

Stay fit

Staying physically and mentally fit enables us to live these values and achieve our goals.


Apple News, unlike Facebook and Google which use AI and algorithms to curate the news for readers, does things the old fashioned way – with humans selecting the news.

If you’ve been following along, you know that LexBlog is creating the largest legal news and commentary network by curating the valuable contributions of legal bloggers, worldwide. 

Right now, we’re featuring stories on the “front page,” changing things out a couple times a day. Channel pages are created dynamically. We have plenty of room for improvement, but it’s a start.

The New York Times’ Jack Nicas detailed in last Sunday’s paper Apple News’ approach of humans over machines. 

One morning in late August, Apple News’s editor in chief, Lauren Kern, huddled with a deputy to discuss the five stories to feature atop the company’s three-year-old news app, which comes preinstalled on every iPhone in the United States, Britain and Australia.

National news sites were leading that day with stories that the Justice Department had backed an affirmative-action lawsuit against Harvard University — a good proxy that the story mattered, said Ms. Kern’s deputy, a former editor for The New York Times whom Apple requested not be named for privacy reasons. He and Ms. Kern quickly agreed that it was the day’s top news, and after reading through a few versions, selected The Washington Post’s report because, they said, it provided the most context and explanation on why the news mattered.

…Ms. Kern said her team aimed to mix the day’s top stories with lighter features and sometimes longer investigations, much like the front page of a newspaper. They largely chose from a list of contenders compiled that morning by three editors in New York who pored over the home pages and mobile alerts of national news sites, as well as dozens of pitches from public

This curation by Apple News has transformed Apple into a powerful news publisher and, per Nicas, transformed Kern, a former journalist, into one the most powerful figures in media. The stories she and her team select regularly receive more than a million visits each.

Apple pulls in news from traditional publishers and, just like LexBlog, pulls in RSS feeds from sources across the Web.

Kern and her team of 30 former journalists in Australia, Europe and the U.S. consume the news through out the day and decide which stories get the top spot.

Ultimately, they select five stories to lead the app, with the top two also displayed in a prominent window to the left of the iPhone home screen. They also curate a magazine-style section of feature stories. The lineup typically shifts five or more times a day, depending on the news. A single editor in London typically chooses the first mix of stories for the East Coast’s morning commute before editors in New York and then Cupertino step in.

LexBlog is now aggregating legal blog posts from close to 20,000 legal bloggers, up about 2,000 bloggers in the two months since we opened the network to bloggers not publishing on LexBlog’s publishing platform.

The posts generated from our data base of blogs published on our platform and RSS feeds from “non-platform” blogs generate anywhere from 150 to 200 stories a day. 

Even with a four or five fold increase in bloggers, journalists employed by LexBlog along with channel leaders from within the blogging community could well maintain human editing of the network. 

Apple News believes it is a lifeline for for journalism. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook sees Apple as having a responsility to help the news industry. “It’s fundamental to democracy.”

LexBlog sees legal blogs as central to increasing access to legal services. Insight and commentary from practicing lawyers not only means more information freely available, but also opens new lines of communicaton  and trust between people and lawyers.

A legal blog news network gives lawyers and the public at large greater access to legal information. For legal bloggers they receive support as well as a shot in the arm from having ther stories highlighted among the best and the brightest, worldwide. 

Traditional legal publishing in the form of law reviews, legal periodicals, treatises and the like continues to slide. At the same time, blogs, much more niche focused and mostly written by practicing  authorities, continue to grow.

A legal blog network supported by a publishing platform, as needed by individual bloggers, can be a lifeline for not only legal information, but also in increasing access to legal services.

And like Apple News, it would seem daily legal news could aggegrated from disparate source and then curated — by real people.