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.

Marketing consultant and author, Euan Semple writes that marketers and “professional communicators” have polluted our networks with industrialized social media.

He’s right.

Not only has social media drifted from real and authentic engagement as means of making strangers less strange, we have consultants teaching industrialized social media as the way of the land and companies selling industrialized social media as a service.

• Share your blog posts this way and that way.
• Use the right image.
• Use these magic words.
• Run analytics on what and when you share to garner data on the right people, the right mediums, the right words and the right times.
• Here’s prepackaged articles for sharing.
• Have us share your “words,” you’re too busy. You don’t even need to know how to log into your social media accounts – or that you even have a social media account, for that matter.
• Sharing the same items across multiple people’s social media accounts – for maximum effect, of course.
• Rather than you getting to know and learn from the thought leaders and influencers, we’ll get to “know them” and build relationships with them for you.
• We’ll write your blog posts and share them for you.
• Not to worry about engaging other people on social media, social media is for broadcasting your stuff to get “them” to come to your website.

This type of stuff would be funny if it weren’t true.

At times, I feel like Euan.

Sometimes I feel like giving up, conceding defeat to the marketers and “professional communicators” who have polluted our networks with industrialised social media.

Like Euan though, social media done “un-industrialized” style has its wonderful moments.

But then a post will trigger a cracking conversation, a podcast will open up a whole new perspective, a moment of online vulnerability will remind me our shared humanity.

LexBlog is launching a new aggregation and syndication platform this month that will power the LexBlog site.

Earlier this year, LexBlog’s new editor-in-chief and publisher, Bob Ambrogi set forth the future of LexBlog and challenged our team in stating:

We want to make the LexBlog network valuable for both publishers and readers of legal blogs. For publishers, we want to help them extend their reach to a global audience. For readers, we want to offer as wide a range of content as possible, but curated to make it useful a reader’s specific interests.”

LexBlog’s mission was now to aggregate all legal blogs, worldwide, and syndicate them a way in which the blogs and bloggers could be discovered and read. The technology that ran LexBlog was not equipped to aggregate and syndicate, thus the build of the new platform.

As with any platform, it’s impossible to know where we’ll end up going with new features, new technology and new products that will emanate from the platform. 

Core to the platform’s evolution though will be publishing. How to shine a light on the authors? How do we provide a good experience for the authors (one they don’t pay for)? And most importantly, how do we provide a good experience for readers?

When LexBlog, then known as LXBN for the “LexBlog Network” was developed seven or eight years all of the blog posts were merely excerpts. When you clicked on a brief excerpt of the post, not enough to even get the gist of post, readers were taken to the blog site to read the post.

I am not sure we could have done it any other way. Law firms would have freaked had we displayed their content in entirety on LXBN, to be read there.

Today’s a new age. Users need to have a simple, eloquent and fast reading experience – particularly on mobile.

For that reason, like any publication, LexBog will have the full posts for easy reading. And unlike eight years ago, law firms and lawyers are not freaked out about it. They like the exposure and influence LexBlog can give them. Syndicating content, just as a TV show is syndicated makes good sense.

Law firms, large and small, are signing up to have their blogs in LexBlog – at no cost – in large numbers.

We’re not going to index their content on Google, their blogs and posts on their blogs will  be indexed. We want the bloggers and the blogs to get featured on search. 

But for a good reader experience and ease of syndication, both benefiting the the authors, we’ll have the full post for reading on LexBlog.

Make sense?

Good couple days last week with Jennifer Brand,  Josh Lynch and Conner O’Keefe from the LexBlog team introducing the State Bar of Texas Website Platform powered by LexBlog to Texas lawyers at their Annual Meeting in Houston.

The platform is presently being offered by the State Bar exclusively to attendee’s of the Bar’s Annual Meeting. This way LexBlog receives  a sample group of lawyers using the platform before the State Bar launches it to all members. This will give our products team data to improve and tailor the platform as needed — primarily focused on ease oif use.

It felt good to hear comments such as “Wow, this is a great offering from the bar,” and “I just need a professional presence at a fair price and this is it.”

I got the real sense that lawyers trusted the State Bar to bring them a sound offering like the bar does with heatlh insurance, retirement plans and legal research.

A lot of small firm lawyers don’t seem to trust the traditional legal website companies, especially the larger ones. At least in Texas, there is a sense that the State Bar does right by me, as a lawyer, and solving the problem of who to trust and what to pay for a website is now being solved by the State Bar.

I wasn’t gung-ho to do a website solution on our publishing platform, but serving lawyers and the State Bar combined with the competitive feeling that comes with a new challenge had me pretty fired up by day two. Josh doing a heck of a job leading the development and launch of this offering didn’t hurt either. It was also Josh who also felt strongly that we should help lawyers where we can.

Our COO, Garry Vander Voort, was also right that getting the team to work on something outside our normal process driven regiment would be good for us. I cannot say there hasn’t been some stress, and I am sure there will more ahead, but it’s making for better relationships across the team and is giving us the assurance we can handle new challenges and opportunities ahead.

When Conner joined LexBlog he wanted a job where he could best help the company and have the most impact. He’s been working withe the success team for the last year plus but has now jumped over to sales. 

With a little coaching from Jen, who has the strong marketing, communications and relationships background/experience, Conner did a heck of a job. Reaching out and talking to lawyers he picked up the vast majority of the lawyers who will be moving forward on using the platform. Maybe he’s picked up the salesperson blood from my Dad.

LexBlog exists on relationships, blogging, social media and will, so we tend to be a rag group when someone asks us to “display” at a conference, something we rarely do.

Having Jen on board to help in Houston was invaluable. Beyond being a pro in all she does and giving us counsel at every turn (with a soft touch), she just makes people feel good – lawyers, State Bar staff and us. Made for better work on our part and more lawyers trusting us. Jen also left us with a nice list of things where we’re not perfect yet. ;) 

I look forward to continuing work on the State Bar website platform offering and after the launch to the entire bar offering the solution to lawyers in other states through their bar associations.

We are seeking someone with passion to become our Communications and Marketing Lead.

Working with company leadership, team members and external resources, you will develop, lead and execute all internal and external communications and marketing, reaching people and organizations, worldwide.

This is not a position for someone seeking the monotony of a larger organization. You will be challenged to work outside your comfort zone in order to grow professionally and personally. We will support you and provide opportunities for growth because we believe in helping our team members realize their potential and dreams.

Responsibilities include:

• Live and communicate LexBlog’s values, internally and externally. Our values enable team members to act with “Integrity in the Moment of Choice” and our audience to know us.
• Own and present the LexBlog brand, internally and externally.
• Develop and lead an authentic social media plan, calling on the talent, energy and personal involvement of the entire LexBlog team.
• Develop and execute your own personal brand via social media, conferences and business relationships.
• Develop, recommend, and lead company communications and marketing plans.
• Increase recognition of the company and our products.
• Work closely with our sales team so that they may help you, and you them.

You will own this role if:

• You like having fun
• You like growing
• You like working with company leadership on a regular basis
• Have a ton of energy
• Have a passion for social media, no matter the form
• You are organized and systematic to a fault
• You like people and enjoy meeting new people
• You are a good writer
• You know done is better than perfect
• You do what it takes

About LexBlog

Founded in 2004 to empower lawyers to increase their visibility and accelerate their business relationships through blogging, LexBlog is the hub that brings together many of the best legal minds on the web. Its publishing platform, offered as software as a service (SaaS), powers more than 15,000 legal bloggers and over half of the nearly 1,500 blogs published by the 200 largest U.S. law firms. By expanding LexBlog to blogs not published on its platform, LexBlog is building the largest and most comprehensive legal news and information network in the world.

Look forward to talking with you. Drop an email to kevin@lexblog.com or  jobs@lexblog.com.

PS - LexBlog believes in hiring PhD’s* (poor, hungry and driven).

* “We’re not talking about people being poor economically. We’re talking about being poor in terms of knowledge, about people who are constantly searching to learn more, to find more wisdom. And hungry in this context refers to those with a tremendous desire to succeed, people who won't ever be satisfied with an ordinary level of accomplishment. And driven people are the ones who set ambitious goals and then pursue them with real ferocity.” - Mario Gabelli

The CEO of LexisNexis, Mike Walsh received a letter this last week from Michael Best’s James Fieweger, a former Asssiatant U.S. Attorney skilled in criminal and state and federal investigations.

A letter accusing Walsh’s company of anticompetitive sales practices and asking that it cease those practices and enter into a dialog with the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) leaders, “as opposed to legal or commercial action.”

AALL is the only national association dedicated to the legal information profession and its professionals. Founded over a century ago on the belief that people —lawyers, judges, students, and the public—need timely access to relevant legal information to make sound legal arguments and wise legal decisions.

Its almost 5,000 members are problem solvers of the highest order from major law firms, law libraries, law schools and various state, federal and municipal bodies. AALL fosters the profession by offering its members knowledge, leadership, and community that make the whole legal system stronger.

What won’t LexisNexis talk about with these 5,000 customers and their representatives? LexisNexis’ practice of tying alleged lesser products to products in greater demand. Want the later, buy the former too.

As LexBlog’s editor-in-chief and publisher, Bob Ambrogi reports:

…[F]irms have historically been able to purchase from LexisNexis the publications and services that fit their needs. They could, for example, purchase specialized materials such as Moore’s Federal Practice, various treatises, or analytical tools such as Lex Machina, without having to license Lexis Advance.

No more says LexisNexis, per Fieweger,

Since July 2017, however, AALL has received numerous reports from law firm-affiliated members that LexisNexis has adopted a new sales policy. Under the new policy, firms are required to purchase a license to Advance before they can purchase access to other LexisNexis publications and products. And those firms that do not wish to purchase Advance, for whatever reason, have been foreclosed from accessing other products they have used in their practice for years and, in some cases, for decades.

AALL has attempted to discuss this potentially illegal tying arrangement, but as the letter to Walsh states, “to date, LexisNexis’ response has been vague, incomplete, and unsatisfactory, evincing no interest or intent to revoke or otherwise modify the practice in question.”

We’re not talking small law firms that LexisNexis is kissing off.  Jean O’Grady, senior director of information, research and knowledge services at DLA Piper and former chair of the Private Law Libraries Section of AALL, reports from her blog that she’s seen LexisNexis take “an increasingly combative stance” in contract negotiations with customers like her firm.

Greg Lambert, chief knowledge services officer at Jackson Walker, shares on his blog, that what LexisNexis is doing in tying Advance and other products such as Law360 is going to serve as a wake up call to firm leaders that LexisNexis is harming the industry and is only trying to prop up a product that cannot stand on its own.

If LexisNexis were talking and listening to its customers, they’d not be exerting this “kiss off, we’ve got a monopoly” approach.

It’s not just at the sales and business development level where LexisNexis folks are refusing to talk, it’s an attitude that’s top down from company leadership.

I’m not sure I know what Mike Walsh looks like, let alone have I ever read one of his blog posts, mutually shared thoughts with him on Twitter or engaged him on LinkedIn or Facebook.

If not Walsh, who then in LexisNexis leadership engages folks on the Internet. Who develops trust for the company? Who gets out and shows that the company cares? Who from LexisNexis has engaged leaders in the library and knowledge field enough that that these folks enjoy taking your call or having a drink with you at next month’s AALL annual conference.

I get it. “I’m the CEO. I’m the Executive VP of Sales. I don’t have time to get out and engage customers and their influencers such as O’Grady and Lambert on the Internet. I don’t even know how. I have marketing and communications folks handling that.”

What you’re really saying is that I am going to push, trick, and cajole our mediocre products into your hands at as a high a price as a I can get. If that doesn’t work, I’ll force you to take my mediocre stuff by tying it to stuff you really want.

Those days are dead. Marketing and selling today is an online conversation establishing trust and relationships.

It would be great to see Walsh at the AALL annual mingling with customers. Perhaps set up a time to field questions.

Ambrogi is the leading reporter and commenator in legal tech and innovation. He’s known and trusted by AALL members.  I’m sure Ambrogi would be happy to sit down with Walsh for an interview on Facebook Live or otherwise.

In face of what O’Grady calls a revolt by the AALL, “LexisNexis should open up about its policies,” says Ambrogi. “Neither it nor its customers are well served by its keeping its lips sealed.”

Ambrogi’s right. LexisNexis owes the legal profession that much.

The vanity marketing for lawyers is a huge one.

The latest entry comes from  U.S. News & World Report which announced in a press release last week that, in partnership with Best Lawyers, it is releasing an online legal directory of lawyers.

The directory will start with less than 100,000 lawyers, but will eventually include over 1.3 million private-practice lawyers. It is not clear whether law firm and bar association sites will be “scrapped” to get lawyer listings or whether the directory listings are being supplied by Best Lawyers. Law firms can, of course, supply information and there is a FAQ on the site for more info.

Client reviews will not be included, unless a lawyer pays $30 a month for a premium profile.

Best Lawyers media relations manager, Katie Morgan, tells the ABA Journal, lawyers can delete the reviews they don’t like, “and decide which ones, if any, to publish on their profile,”

In addition to being able to publish favorable reviews, lawyers paying the $30 a month may display rankings and awards with their profile in “ an ad-free experience.” Presumably this means that ads from competing lawyers and law firms will be sold around the directory listings of non-paying lawyers.

Lawyers will pay for this listing. The more directory listings the better for many lawyers. The more online walls to hang their plaques and awards. Better yet, for $30 a month, you get a valuable link back to your website for SEO. A link from an influential news authority like U.S. News was.

The press release says the comprehensive guide will serve as a valuable resource for consumers seeking legal assistance. But how valuable is the information to people and businesses when selecting a lawyer?

Tim Smart, executive editor of U.S. News, says:

U.S. News helps millions of people each year make complex decisions, from finding the right hospital or doctor to identifying the best college, online program or graduate school. We’re delighted to team up with Best Lawyers to offer our audience new legal resources.

U.S. News bills itself as “the global authority in rankings and consumer advice.” Best Lawyers® bills itself as “the world’s only purely peer-review™ guide to top talent in the legal profession.”

“The global authority” and “the world’s only purely peer-review.” I don’t know.

And look at the standard for lawyers getting into the directory.

Inclusion in the Lawyer Directory is solely based on whether an attorney is currently working in private practice. A lawyer does not need to be ranked by U.S. News or Best Lawyers to appear on the site, and there is no charge for a lawyer’s basic information to appear in the U.S. News Lawyer Directory.

A lawyer in private practice needs to be breathing to qualify for inclusion in the directory.

Where does it stop and couldn’t we, as lawyers and law firms, do better?

I get the need for directories – maybe. But more of them? And to cast your directory as special and authoritative, which this one doesn’t appear to be.

As a lawyer, why not use the Internet in a little more constructive way – by helping businesses and individuals and building a name for yourself – rather than buying vanity.