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.

A snappy 10 hour flight yesterday and I was back in Seattle from London where I attended the Legal Geek Law Tech Conference, met with law firms and introduced LexBlog to The Law Society.

I said it last year, and this next year I’ll follow through on it — that being to get to London, regularly, to expand LexBlog’s international reach and influence.

It’s important not only for LexBlog to expand markets globally, but for LexBlog to evangelize the cause of legal blogging, worldwide, for both the democratization of legal publishing and making legal services more accessible. 

The UK, and I suspect the rest of the world, is dealing with the same crisis in access to legal services as the States. Lawyers/solicitors are becoming irrelevant to the majority of consumers and small business people. This erodes not only citizens’ legal rights but the very business of lawyers. Legal blogging establishes trust and communication between lawyers and people narrowing this divide.

UK based large law firms and lawyers in these firms are struggling with how to effectively publish through the net for business development and building a name. Many are blindly publishing content, pushing it out and hoping something comes of it for business development.

Most large firms are using, some knowingly, others not, antiquated publishing software that’s not being updated on any regular basis.

LexBlog has the opportunity to help these firms with our managed WordPress publishing platform. We could save them money and time, improve security and performance, improve ease of use, increase syndication/visibility and enable integration of their blogs and other publishing with their websites – all without delayed website development limiting regular updates and feature enhancements.

The Legal Geek Law Tech Conference was nothing short of amazing. 2,000 attendees from 40 countries, 100 speakers across multiple stages, countless legal tech companies displaying their solutions in booths set up in a down to earth garage like setting, and legal professionals from large firms, small firms and major companies. 

Beyond the educational side, the networking opportunities at a European conference are outstanding. Chatting with lawyers, legal tech entrepreneurs and executives in major companies from the UK, Spain, Norway, Switzerland, Singapore and other countries is something you don’t get at U.S. conferences. 

Talking to people from overseas not only leads to relationships for business development, but also gives one a different perspective on the law, legal services and legal technology.

As a result, just today, I was introducing, via Twitter, a Swiss legal tech company founder to the general counsel of a highly successful and heavily funded U.S. legal tech company.

I wanted to meet with folks with The Law Society for a few reasons. One to introduce them to LexBlog – what we do and what we stand for. I figured they’d hear about us as we started “knocking on doors.”

Secondly I wanted to see if there were ways LexBlog could help The Law Society and their member solicitors. In that we liberally support good causes, law students, law schools and access to the delivery of legal services, I thought there may be some common ground.

Third, I wanted to get their feedback as to introducing LexBlog’s free legal blogging community and the solutions we offer to UK law firms.

I’ll confess traveling overseas for work makes for an attractive “vacation,” with Mrs. RL and I traveling together. Heck, just walking/taking the underground from one meeting to the next is an experience in and of itself – the sites and the people were great.

One successful lawyer, looking to expand her influence in fashion law across Europe, even met us at the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum for coffee and to show us around limited viewing areas.

The scary part in this travel is that I am home for only today before heading out to Boston for College of Law Practice Management and Legal Marketing Association conferences and meeting law firms. Only a 5 hour flight there though.

The cause is good in all this travel — shining a light on legal bloggers, worldwide, and improved access to legal services.

I was in Chicago this week, speaking at a couple of law schools.

The topic? How law students can use blogging and social media for learning, building relationships and building a name.

The more I speak at law schools, the more I realize law students and law schools are much like lawyers and law firms when it comes to blogging and other social media.

There is the understandable fear of doing something that will leave an indelible mark, the fear of not knowing perfectly what you are doing (learning by trial and error is not usually done in the law nor promoted in law school), and the difficulty of being openly real and authentic.

It’s hit and miss from law school to law school as to whether students are receptive to the message of networking through the Internet via social media and blogging.

Those schools with law professors, deans and career development professionals acting as role models on social media and blogging and with educational programs in this regard are way ahead of the game. The students at their schools are receptive, want to learn and want to get started.

And unfortunately, just like lawyers, most law students are not willing to put in the time to distinguish themselves. That’s real disappointing as the need to develop a personal brand and be seen as willing to assert oneself is ever increasing.

My visiting school to school, repetitively, doesn’t really scale. It’s going to take boots on the ground in the form of knowledgeable and experienced law students at the law schools with the support from the mothership in Seattle – LexBlog.

Westlaw has had student reps, and so has LexNexis. We’re seeing newer legal tech companies such as casetext with student reps.

LexBlog student reps could be at a law school to help a fellow student spin up for a free professional blog in minutes through the expedited LexBlog system. They could show fellow students the social media to use from Twitter, Facebook, to  LinkedIn and how to use these networking tools effectively.

I raised the idea of a LexBlog representative at one of the schools yesterday. The idea was very well received by a law professor. In fact, seen as possibly more valuable to students than services from other organizations with student representatives.

It will be very special to see the progression of law students building a name and relationships while in law school by networking through the net.

Who knows? Maybe they’ll teach lawyers and law schools a thing or two.

Link rot in the law is a real problem.

Lawyers, law firms, law schools and other legal publishers don’t plan for link rot, nor do they appreciate the link rot they are causing – mostly by their naivety or the naiviety of the party handling their blog and web publishing.

Sourcing Wikipedia liberally, link rot happens when links on individual websites, blogs or publications point to web pages, servers or other resources that have become permanently unavailable.

Such links are typically referred to as a “broken link” or a “dead link.” Bottom line, the target of the reference no longer exists – or at least not where it originally existed — and you get a 404 error.

Research shows that the half-life of a random webpage is two years. The half-life of a legal page, as evidenced by law blogs, is longer than that.

Link rot becomes significant in the law because of the role precedent plays in the law.

I don’t follow primary law – codes, regs and cases as much as secondary law – blogs, law reviews and journals.

I’d think links to primary law would be in pretty good shape as the source, in most cases, is still there as cited. Blogs, and soon to be published just like blogs on WordPress, law reviews and journals, are not in good shape, “rot-wise.”

How bad is link rot?

A 2014 Harvard Law School study study by Jonathan Zittrain, Kendra Albert and Lawrence Lessig, determined that approximately 50% of the URLs in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer link to the original information. They also found that in a selection of legal journals published between 1999 and 2011, more than 70% of the links no longer functioned as intended.

Any number of things cause link rot.

• Site taken down, invalidating the links which are pointing to it. Law firms have done this to the blogs of lawyers who have left the firm.
• Some form of blocking such as content filters or firewalls. LexisNexis’ 360 is an example.
• Links may be removed as a result of legal action or court order.
• Content may be intentionally removed by the “owner.”
• Many news sites keep articles freely accessible for only a short time period, and then move them behind a paywall. This causes a significant loss of supporting links in sites discussing news events and using media sites as references. ALM has done this in the case of contributions from legal authorities.
• Websites can be restructured or redesigned, or the underlying technology can be changed, altering or invalidating large numbers of inbound or internal links. Happens all the time with law firms which often treat legal insight and momentary by their own legal authorities as secondary to marketing and website deign.
• Dead links can also occur on the authoring side, when website content is assembled from Internet sources and deployed without properly verifying the link targets.
• A website might change its domain name. Links pointing to the old name might then become invalid. This regularly happens when legal professionals move their publishing off platforms such as Medium and when law firms run their lawyer blogs inside the law firm’s website.

Link rot can be combatted in any number of ways.

• When you change URL’s, use redirection mechanisms such as “301: Moved Permanently” to automatically refer browsers and crawlers to the new location. This won’t work when sites are moved from platforms such as Medium where there is no server side access.
• Content management systems, such as WordPress, may offer built-in solutions to the management of links, such as updating them when content is changed or moved on a site. WordPress guards against link rot by replacing non-canonical URLs with their canonical versions.
• Web archivists can, and are, engaged in collecting websites. The Library of Congress is doing this for some law blogs. LexBlog is looking at the question of archiving blogs on LexBlog, which will grow to be an aggregation of law blogs worldwide. Archiving, alone, may still have the issue of not displaying the original url which citations would point to.
• Getting law firms to recognize that many law blogs, like journal and law review articles, are more than merely marketing. Scholoraly and legal work is not to put out in the public domain and pulled back at the whim of law firm policy.
• Smarter use of the web by web developers,  legal professionals and legal publishers who lack an appreciation of the link rot they are causing.
• Use established publishing protocol – WordPress. WordPress runs 70% of all sites with a content management solution, and it’s going to grow to 90%. Web developers using proprietary or marginally used website software can use suchj software for a website, but not for publishing, where they’ll use WordPress.

Legal librarians, knowledgement magament professionals and archivists have a better understanding of link rot and its ramifications.

As crazy as it may sound, link rot is real and so are the problems it genrerates in a precedent and citation driven field, such as the law.

I was reminded by a Facebook post from technologist and the founder of blogging, Dave Winer, that law blogs need to be hosted for perpetuity.

Here’s something basic. If you host blogs, you have an ethical obligation to try to keep the archive online for perpetuity. This allows for bankruptcy or acts of war or god, and mortality, but if you’re not committed to best efforts, then don’t host.

If blogs are not archived and made available for reading forever, we’ve lost someone’s insight and commentary. The links to such a blog’s posts would be lost. Citations to such a blog would be meaningless.

Imagine if we threw away all the law journal/review articles and legal treatises when the author stopped writing or passed. We got their works off the library shelves and tossed them into the dumpster.

Every citation to their works in briefs, court decisions (trial and appellate), briefs, and other journals and treatises would be “dead.”

At first glance, you may think, “So what, someone stops legal blogging or passes, their law blog goes away. Who needs it for posterity sake, other than maybe their relatives?”

We also have a ton of junk and marginal copy out their in the form of law blogs.

Law blogs, once exclusively lawyers reporting on legal developments and exchanging insight and comments to advance legal dialogue, have become the home of many “content marketers.” Rather than legal commentary and news, we have marketers and PR people penning content for lawyers merely to garner search engine rankings and website traffic.

But at the end of the day, we have a ton of good legal insight and commentary being penned by thousands of legal professionals, world-wide. It’s coming on just about every legal topic under the sun, certainly more topics are being covered than in the days before publishing was democratized by blogging.

The blog posts are directed to consumers, business people, in-house counsel, practicing lawyers, judges, law porofessors, law students, law librarians, legal industry suppliers and legal innovators and entrepreneurs.

These posts are regularly cited by other bloggers, mainstream publishers and presenters.

Perhaps more significantly these posts are cited by courts and lawyers in submissions to the court. Not as primary law, but as secondary law, just as law reviews, journals and treatises are cited. Blogs, for that matter, are replacing law reviews and law journals altogether.

Beyond citations by courts and to courts, we need a history of legal news and commentary to search and call upon in our work to advance the law. The history cannot be tossed.

Perpetual hosting may be done by government or quasi-governmental bodies, such as libraries. I believe the Library of Congress already archives a good number of law blogs.

Private companies, such as LexBlog, with business models, in part supported by archiving and syndicating legal blogs are a good possibility as well. We are in the process of archiving and syndicating legal blogs penned by close to 20,000 legal professionals. I don’t see us tossing blog posts.

Hosting costs, not insignificant, are certainly decreasing.

Winer’s right. Blogs need to be archived online for perpetuity.

Facebook will cede its runner-up position in website traffic to YouTube in the next couple of months, according to a new study shared with CNBC by market research firm SimilarWeb.

From CNBC:

The five websites receiving the most traffic in the U.S. in the last several years have been Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo and Amazon, in that order. However, Facebook has seen a severe decline in monthly page visits, from 8.5 billion to 4.7 billion in the last two years, according to the study. Although Facebook’s app traffic has grown, it is not enough to make up for that loss, the study said.

The Facebook drop is pretty apparaent when charted. 

Facebook has been growing in plenty of markets abroad and Facebook users are now spending more time on other Facebook owned platforms, including Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

YouTube is growing, in part, because of increased use on platforms like Chromecast and Smart TVs.

Facebook’s slide doesn’t matter to lawyers — at least those lawyers who grow their business by nurturing relationships and building a name.

Facebook is where more people engage more people than anywhere – online or offline. YouTube is great, but’s a democratized broadcasting platform. Broadcasting is a far cry from listening/reading and commenting in response.

Facebook is a conversation among business colleagues, friends, relatives, and community members. It’s where we hear of a customer’s wedding anniversary celebration and a business partner’s oldest child graduating from college. It’s where we receive news and commentary on a recent legal or business development — and join in the ensuing discussion.

Just yesterday Daniel Rodriguez shared (not announced) on Facebook that with his role complete as Dean at Northwestern Law School he will be headed to Stanford Law School for the fall semester. Likes and comments congratulating him and welcoming him to California ensued from colleagues and friends.

Rodriguez wouldn’t think of leaving the professional and personal interaction with people on Facebook anymore than he would think of leaving Twitter, where he is a force of nature in driving discussuion among innovators in the law, world-wide.

For lawyers and other professionals using Facebook, the discussion only gets richer as we connect and engage to get to know people better, to learn and to build a reputation.

Sure there are those who fear Facebook. They’ll look at the news of Facebook’s website traffic decline as validation that Facebook is evil or a waste of time.

It doesn’t matter to the increasing number of legal professionals who see the growing value of Facebook.