IceRocket and Mark Cuban, are you listening?

Mark, thanks for setting the record straight that IceRocket.com is not a search engine, but a way to follow a topic that you need to keep up with. I loved the last line of your recent post.

Icerocket.com will help you track the world so you never fall behind on any topic or keyword that is important to you.

I need your help in introducing a tracking engine to the legal profession. The law is as information intensive an industry as you’re going to find. Plus lawyers are fiercely driven to get more information to both advance cases & transactional matters they are working on and for competitive intelligence to get better clients and work. I practiced as a trial lawyer for 17 years and would have given my right arm for the stuff IceRocket can deliver.

My company, LexBlog, is the leading provider of professional marketing blogs to the legal profession. LexBlog has built a brand that is synonymous with lawyer blogs. By default, we’re teaching lawyers, marketing professionals and business development folks in some of the best law firms in the country how to monitor information they need to keep up with. They’re simply amazed when we show them what they can find on an aggregator like IceRocket, NewsGator, or Technorati. Problem is, getting at this info is not intuitive enough for them.

The legal profession is not the most tech savvy and is generally light years behind in innovation. Worse yet, companies that dominate the space such as LexisNexis and Thomson wait for lawyers to demand things before they develop a new product. Problem is lawyers don’t know what they need and can use until it’s served up to them.

Well, let’s serve it up. I know any idiot should be able to use IceRocket but I still need a simple user interface, using the same IceRocket backend, that makes clear for lawyers (liberally borrowing from you Mark):

• It’s a tracking engine – a simple and easy way to search for information about any keyword or topic and return to you the freshest information available.
• It allows lawyers to easily track that information on an ongoing basis, giving examples using legal terminology and information as guides.
• It’s different than Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines where one ask questions.
• How they easily subscribe to any website returned that supports RSS, and that it enables RSS for any search result.
• How to customize the search by things like date.
• It won’t just index information from blogs, but index any and every source of information that is updated on an ongoing basis, ie, forums & corporate RSS feeds.

Lawyers are not afraid to pay for information. They pay tens, and in the case of larger firms, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to LexisNexis and Thomson for information. There are 400,000+ practicing lawyers. Imagine 5% of those lawyers paying $90 per year for a lawyer friendly user interface developed by LexBlog hooked up to the IceRocket.com backend. That’s a $2 million dollar product.

I have talked with NewsGator and PubSub about using their tools as a tracking engine for the legal industry. Discussions, for whatever reason, have gone no where.

Why work with LexBlog? We have domain expertise. We can develop a user friendly UI lawyers can understand. We’re a profitable company that is becoming very well known among leading law firms for blogs and RSS. There is not another legal vendor that is more active than I am in the blogosphere. There is no one more passionate. We can virally market such as product so law firms are clamoring for it. We don’t need a sales force of hundreds.

This is not bubbly talk. It’s just common sense that lawyers use an inexpensive product which makes much needed information easy to track.

Let’s do what you say for the legal profession Mark: “If you want to know what is being said about anything, by anybody, for any given period of time Icerocket.com is the place to start. If you want to keep up with or track the results of that search, we are the place to stay.”