As we approach the closing hours of the month, I feel I should post something that is worthy of heading my October 2007 archive. It is this:
There are only 227,220 men and women between 35 and 60 on Facebook in the UK.
SagaZone to the rescue!
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Banging on about the benefits of blogs is not the sole preserve of Binary Law. Kevin O’Keefe, leading US champion of blogs for lawyers, does it constantly and persuasively. Today he succinctly summarises why large law firm blogs beat law firm websites with RSS feeds.
Steve Matthews of Stem shows “how useful RSS can be outside the personal reader” with LegalPubs.ca, “a one stop showcase of the products offered by Canadian legal publishers”.
Using RSS technology, I have mixed the 10 latest items for each of the publishers … Each entry is passed along unmodified from the publisher’s original feed, and simply sorted by date to produce a “dynamic watchable list” of the latest products available. The main page of the site also includes the linked headlines for each feed as an individual source.
What Steve demonstrates is close to the heart of anyone convinced of the power of “free” information. By “free” here I don’t mean (necessarily) free to air, but free in the sense that it is published in open standards (or as web services) to suit the needs of those requesting it.
Understandably, most publishers are currently vexed by the question how best to exploit their proprietary information: how much to give away and how much to lock up behind subscription paywalls. But where there are no proprietorial issues, there is no sense in being proprietorial. New book information is promotional information the publishers want to circulate as widely as possible. So long as such information is not free, ie remains locked up in the publishers’ own formats (their own web pages, spreadsheets, pdfs etc), as is the case with all UK law publishers, it is of very limited value. Unlock it by publishing it as RSS feeds like the good folks in Canada and people like Steve and me will pick up the ball and run with it, developing innovative services that do more for the publisher than the publisher could ever do themselves.
Update: To add your voice to a Campaign for UK Law Publishers’ RSS Feeds, post a comment on the subsequent Dear Publisher post and join lo-fi’s Facebook group.
In the second extract from his forthcoming book, The End of Lawyers?, published in Times Online, Richard Susskind revisits his predictions in 1996′s The Future of Law:
I argued that … many of our fundamental assumptions about the nature of legal service and the nature of legal process would be challenged by the coming of information technology and the internet. In other words, much that we had always taken for granted in the past, about the way that lawyers work and the way non-lawyers receive legal guidance, would change through technology. …
I believe now, and I believed then, that we are in a transitional phase between the print-based industrial society and the IT-based information society. Only when knowledge-based technologies allow us to manage more effectively these mountains of data we have created, will we be fully in the information society. …
I believe there is not just a latent legal market for the ordinary citizen but also for major organisations, too, when they find it difficult to secure legal guidance on all those occasions when they need it. …
I had in mind the notion that as citizens we should be able to find out easily and quickly what our legal entitlements are, and in so doing, we should be able to avoid legal disputes. …
I argued then that hyper-regulation means not that there is too much law by some objective standard, but that there is too much law given our current methods of managing it. Of course, I was creeping towards the suggestion that, with the coming of knowledge-based technologies, the volume of the law would be more easily managed with the assistance of our systems. …
When I suggested ten years ago that e-mail would become the principal means by which clients and lawyers would communicate, many people suggested I was dangerous, that I was probably insane and that I certainly did not understand anything about security or confidentiality.
In fact it was somewhat more than ten tears ago. The Future of Law was published in early 1996 and was thus written in late 1995. That year is significant, for then only a few of us had awoken to the internet; only a handful of firms had websites; there was no free law to speak of and no e-commerce; Google’s founders were still in high school and facebooks were still published annually in hard covers. So it’s all the more remarkable for Susskind to have so accurately predicted the shape of the legal internet today (and of tomorrow – for, as he says, we are only half way through his 20-year view).
Lo-fi librarian bemoans the lack of RSS feeds for new title information from the law publishers.
Feeds for new titles and editions is such a no brainer, in my view everyone would benefit, there is less chance of a new text being overlooked and ordered late so the user is happy, the librarian saves time and eyesight and the reps would be under less pressure to produce unwieldy spreadsheets.
We’ve been here before. I simply do not understand why LexisNexis, Thomson et al will spend millions on their web “products” but appear not to have a clue how to make everyone’s life easier and “sell” their core print/CD product releases via RSS information feeds.
So I have taken some recent new books data from S&M and Jordans, put it in the infolaw Lawfinder database and enabled RSS feeds for that part of the database.
Here’s the link to a prototype Lawfinder New Books section. Browse the appropriate publisher and you’ll find their latest titles listed last first; or grab the feed which lists the last 30.
The data comes directly from the publishers’ spreadsheets/pdfs. Only 2007 titles published up to the last completed month are included and the publication dates are all recorded as the 1st of the publication month. The links I have constructed using their URL search query syntax for ISBN searches (though some of the S&M ISBN queries don’t find anything – surprise, surprise).
It should not be too much of a sweat to update this every couple of months when the publishers send their spreadsheets/pdfs, but I’m not committing to that: tell me there’s something in it for me. And, more to the point, why can’t they produce their own feeds in the first place?
Times Online publishes the first of several excerpts from Richard Susskind’s forthcoming book, The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the nature of legal services, due next May from OUP, from which:
the law is not there to provide a livelihood for lawyers any more than ill-health exists to offer a living for doctors. Successful legal business may be a by-product of law in society, but it is not the purpose of law. And, just as numerous other industries and sectors are having to adapt to broader change, so too should lawyers. …
The challenge is not to assess how commoditisation and IT might threaten the current work of lawyers, so that the traditional ways can be protected and change avoided. It is to find and embrace better, quicker, less costly, more convenient and publicly valued ways of working.
Navigational search – gaining access to a specific site or page by searching for the actual web address or a portion of it – is common, not just amongst the uninitiated (who you might say do it out of ignorance), but amongst the web savvy.
It’s actually astonishing how often people search for the complete web address and click on the corresponding search result to get to the site they are trying to navigate to. It makes me laugh every time I see my parents do this, but even more amazing is when the “web savvy” amongst us does this.
Jack Schofield at the Guardian:
As a “web savvy” person, I do it often, and Jeremy should know why. First, if I type into the search box instead of the address bar, it doesn’t matter if I make a typing mistake. Second, I might be guessing or have half-remembered the URL I want: it may look stange if I get it right, but often I don’t. Third, there are plenty of Web sites that are not very responsive, or include a lot of junk code. Rather than going to the site, I might actually want to look at it in Google’s cache first.
But thinking in terms of URLs for web access is so Web 1.0 don’t you think?
With Google refining its algos and providing special searches and with websites increasingly using URL rewriting, the need to use URLs for access and to use in-site searches will all but disappear.
For example, to access a Wikipedia article on a topic, I just type wikipedia <search term> into the Google search box. Most times a specific Wikipedia article is No. 1 on Google. Similarly to find a page on any other site, I type <domain> <search term>. This works even for low-ranked sites provided the domain is a sufficiently unique word; and only of course if the search term is likely to be in a page title. For special Google searches I type define <word>, books <search term> etc, or just a post code to find a location on Google maps, etc.
And in Firefox you don’t even need to use the search box as it will perform a search on words typed into the address bar (you can configure Firefox to use whichever search engine you prefer).
Here’s a great new Law 2.0 initiative.
CaseCheck, headed by Stephen Moore, offers case summaries from the Scottish Courts and EAT, delivered latest-first and also categorised, with RSS feeds. Selected committed users author the summaries; all users can add comments.
Does that sound like a familiar formula? Yes, it’s built with an open source blog platform. And it’s all free – just register for full use.
Our mission at CaseCheck is to alter the way in which legal information is shared. We are creating a community based resource where everyone can have the opportunity of demonstrating their knowledge and skill in their area of law. You never know who might be reading your comments and opinions – potential clients, employees and employers are out there.
(Hat tip: Delia Venables)
Steve Matthews posts a considered article on Slaw on Thought Leadership – the selling of ‘expertise’ that has always been a crucial element to legal marketing – through blogging:
The results that can be achieved … have been repeatedly demonstrated with current blogging leaders, and are difficult to refute:
- Increased media exposure;
- A devoted referral network;
- Increased offers to do speaking engagements;
- More writing & publishing opportunities;
- A dominant presence in the search engines; and finally,
- Behind-the-scenes exchanges with other experts, which increases one’s exposure to an industry’s leading strategies & tactics.
Just think what effort it would take to achieve all the above through other means.
Larry Bodine thinks so:
Clients use Google to look up phone numbers and addresses, so law firms can cancel their yellow pages ads. When clients want to check out your firm, they are not going to call up to get your printed brochure, they will look you up online.
Kevin O’Keefe agrees but sees the directories playing a part in your visibility on Google:
As for directories such as FindLaw, Martindale-Hubbell, Super Lawyers, Avvo, and the like, the most important function they can play is getting the biographical information of your firm and its lawyers indexed at Google. The days of a lawyer directory portal site where Internet users go to look up lawyers are coming to an end.
However, I’m sure both Larry and Kevin would agree that what’s most important is for you directly to influence your visibility on the search engines – Google in particular – as that’s where most people search, unrestricted by the broad subject classifications used by the directories; you target the specific terms that will be most relevant and most effective in attracting hits. Gaining front page rankings on Google is not easy, but a significant improvement is achievable and need cost very little: the basic principles for improving the “keyword relevance” of your pages are straightforward, and, for example, the effectiveness of blogs in generating Google juice is well proven. When you’ve done what you can, you can then consider where to spend your “directory” budget – lawyer directories or Google Ads? I think Google wins again.
