Last week, LexBlog began a membership campaign to connect as many quality law blogs as possible. Kevin O’Keefe, the CEO of LexBlog, and Bob Ambrogi, the Editor-in-Chief, sat down to talk about recent events surrounding the campaign and the world of legal marketing.
Kevin O’Keefe: I’m here with the Bob Ambrogi, the editor-in-chief and publisher of LexBlog. Is that right, Bob?
Bob Ambrogi: I sure hope so. I’m pretty sure that’s who I am.
Kevin O’Keefe: We’re here in Seattle. You’re here for the week. Why did you come out?
Bob Ambrogi: I came out because we just hired a new editor to help with the launch of a LexBlog network that we’ve been working on and I wanted to help get her oriented and trained and set up a little bit. I’m really excited to have a woman named Melissa Lin on board, a journalism major and has worked with some publications around Seattle, editor of her college newspaper, and we’re really thrilled to have her as part of the team.
Kevin O’Keefe: It’s pretty exciting. We ran LexBlog in the old days, well, we ran LXB as an adjunct site, where we did more of just “Featuring”
posts, if you will, as opposed to running it as a news site. At least from my standpoint, you came on and kind of set the vision earlier this year that LexBlog should be the largest and most comprehensive legal news and commentary site in the world by virtue of curating legal blog posts. But the challenge you have is, you know, who are the publishers and editors? We had a really fine person that was doing it before, but her heart
was as much in baseball as it was in the law. And she’s gone on and now works in digital media at Cooperstown, of all things. So Melissa’s passion, when she interviewed and I said, what does she envision doing for the future? And she goes, “I’d like to go to law school in my late twenties, early thirties.” Why? “To become a better journalist,” and I’m thinking, she’s parroting you.
Bob Ambrogi: That happens to be why I went to law school. I went to law school to get ahead of journalism. That was my thinking way back then. Some people think it sounds kind of crazy when I tell them that, but that really is why I went to law school. I guess it’s kind of worked, with one leg in journalism and one leg in law for the rest of my life.
Kevin O’Keefe: The effort now has shifted from featuring blogs or posts per se, to creating a new site. So, you know, with maybe a couple hundred stories that come across our desk a day, across the machines, you know, what is the news? And by and large, and I don’t know what you’ve seen as far as the lawyers covering the news, but it’s not all bad.
Bob Ambrogi: I keep making this point. I think it’s really interesting to see the extent to which blogs, and I’ve said this before and some of you
listening probably have heard me say it, but blogs have replaced some of the traditional news media in the legal area in particular. The coverage by blogs of court opinions of regulatory developments. Of all of this, the things that matter to lawyers is exceptional. There are bloggers out there who are literally breaking news in the sense that they’re often the first ones reporting court opinions that come down or new regulatory developments. There are others that are doing the second day, the third day, a later take on it, writing more analytical pieces: What does this mean for the lawyers? What does this mean for your clients? What does this mean for your company? The problem before is it’s been hard to find all of that stuff and what we’re doing is pulling it together in a way that it makes sense that it makes it usable and really building a community around this worldwide network of people who are writing about law.
Kevin O’Keefe: And as part of it, this week we started a campaign, we’ll talk about that in a second, but the question was, what was the reach of this network already? This rag tag group of 18,000 bloggers that organically has grown to 20,000 since we opened it, whether people were running on our software or not. It does appear statistically to be the largest legal news network in the world. It’s running at 3 million unique visitors a month. 3 million unique visitors a month is the reach of the network. When I heard that, what was most fascinating to me was everybody has prided, I wouldn’t say prided, but we’ve measured media, I assume going back to whenever it started. When a magazine
came out 100 years ago, they measured it on circulation of this magazine, how many people read it when we printed it and put it out. Then the web came out, it’s not that old, but it’s twenty-some years old. We measured it based on first impressions and then unique visitors of this site, but what if you measured it on the reach of your network? So, if CBS is running a network nationally, what is the reach of that network and the people
that see their news out at affiliate stations all across the United States and the world? It’s much bigger. So at LexBlog, we have all of these affiliate publications. Thousands. And their reach, because of independent reach being relevant on independent subjects, is greater than saying everybody should come here.
Bob Ambrogi: Yeah. And I think it’s important to emphasize because not everybody understands this, that in building out this network, we’re not just talking about blogs that have been, in the past, customers or continue to be customers of LexBlog. We invite any lawyer, any law firm, any legal blogger or any legal professional who has a blog– go to our site, LexBlog.com/join, sign up and you can add your blog to this feed that we’re developing for the site that we’re developing.
Kevin O’Keefe: We’re going to get them, too.
Bob Ambrogi: And that’s the campaign you’re talking about. Why don’t you talk about the campaign?
Kevin O’Keefe: Gary Vander Voort is our COO, and I probably waste a half hour or 40 minutes of his time every single day on various things. One day I said, “If it was up to me, we’d just get some talented interns in here and they can start recruiting the bloggers and let’s accelerate the pace they’re joining.” And I think I came back from a trip and Gary goes, “We’ve got two talented interns,” and unbeknownst to Bob until probably this week even, and I heard it was going on. They went out and identified over 4,000 potential blogs, putting together a list, but then culled it down– there are probably only about 2100 on that list that were credible blogs– and started contacting them all. They put together a spreadsheet of the name of the blog, the name of the lawyer or lawyers that were publishing the blog, the name of the firm, telephone numbers, emails, websites for the firm and looked at the blogs and have been sending out personal notes. It’s interesting when you think about it because as you said, well, do these people have any legal training? But what we forget is that people are relatively smart and when they read something and they read about the background of the person that they’re reading about, they can conclude, is this credible or not? It’s the same way that when people said, when
blogging started, wait a second, Kevin, you can’t have lawyers have blogs because nobody will know whether the lawyer knows enough about the subject to be able to report on it. So nobody will ever read them. And I said, I’ve tried cases in front of a jury, they can figure out what’s BS and what’s not in the short period of time. It’s a cool campaign. I don’t know, when you walked in and heard about it cold, and then we talked
about it a while today– what’s your take on the idea of the campaign and what we’re doing and what you’re going to try to do with it, too?
Bob Ambrogi: Well, I think the reaching out to people is important. We’ve been trying to reach out through any number of ways. We want
to have literally every legal blog in the world as part of this, eventually. It makes sense for the readers of our site. It makes sense for the bloggers who were part of it. However we can get them in, that’s great. So, you know, if you see an email come from LexBlog over the next couple of weeks, it ain’t spam and we’re not trying to sell you anything. That’s the important thing when people keep asking, “Well, what are you gonna charge me? How are you going to make money off of this?” We want to open this up. We want to make this a public network. There’s no charge to read stuff, there’s no charge to have your blog be part of this. Unlike some other sites out there that put all the stuff behind a pay wall, we’re not doing this. We want this all out there in the public.
Kevin O’Keefe: And there has to be a better way to produce media and make information freely and openly available in the ways of the past,
because there’s so much struggling going on in media today, and in publishing, as to how you make money with this. Our philosophy is that everything should be open, everything should be free. So the entire network is obviously open and free, and all the other publications to people. It shouldn’t run ads, because these are, these are authoritative and influential publications. LexBlog should be this giant network so people can
discover the best people and we can put feeds out of information that also should be free. When people do say, “How do you make money?” Well, there’s a software component so people should be licensing software that they would use for publishing, and we’ll do that. And ironically, we’ve got a CTO that’s sitting 15 feet, 20 feet from us right now that wants that to be free. He wants to get it to the point where the LexBlog platform would be free. And then people may pay for additions to it along the way, but it would start as free. What used to sell for $200, he would like to be free– $200 a month, he would like to be free. So it’s fascinating to hear. The other thing we heard about this week when you come out and we ended up getting in some good meetings, it was part of the goal meeting, and our CTO brought it up, and that was the artificial intelligence
component. I hadn’t heard of it in that concrete a way before that meeting, the artificial intelligence use with all of this content. I don’t know what your take was on that.
Bob Ambrogi: Well, I think one of the challenges that we face when we’re bringing in all of this content, what we’re trying to do is to make it as useful as we can for readers of the site, and that means organizing it in a way that makes it useful. And we’re doing that in part through our aggregation already. As feeds come in, we’re assigning them to different categories– are they about criminal law? Are they about intellectual property law? It gets more and more challenging and it gets a little bit restricted doing it that way because you might do a blog where you write about a bunch of different things, and it doesn’t all fit into one fit category all the time. So if we can do a better job of applying artificial intelligence to identify what this is about– what we’re talking about, what the categories are, what the topics are–that would be huge in terms of being able to organize this information and make it more available. There are some ways to do that, arguably, now, but really I think what we’re going to
be doing is, if we follow through on the vision of what we’re talking about here, I think we’re going to have a really sophisticated application built to do this, that could have applications beyond just what we’re doing.
Kevin O’Keefe: And I would say that 10 years ago, the idea that LexBlog would be talking about use of machine learning for patterns of content
and data as he looks at it, we would have had to partner with some huge company because how could a company like ours have resources to do that? So now we come forward 10 years, we now have 70 percent of all content management on the web running on WordPress, soon to be probably 90 percent, it will be ubiquitous. Then, when you use a host, the host offers artificial intelligence. So whether it’s going to run across AWS or whether it’s going to run across Google, there’s a local company here in Seattle that offers similar types of services, you can identify how you want to use their artificial intelligence base, how you would want to use their taxonomy and tagging structures, and how you create your own by leveraging what they already have available. So small companies like LexBlog with a strong, nimble technology team can harness technology
that did not exist a short time ago at very reasonable prices. So this is eminently doable.
Bob Ambrogi: Yeah, I think the other thing we were talking about this week that I am really looking forward to is to making some design and
organization changes to LexBlog.com. LexBlog.com has been a site for a long time, at some point we made the decision to change it from a marketing site to an editorial site. We kind of launched the first new iteration of that this fall. We’re going to now make some design tweaks, maybe is the right word, to present the information a little bit better. We’re also going to be beginning to build out, you know, everybody who’s on every blog that’s listed on LexBlog, but if we’ve got a page for their blog, got a page for the authors of the blog, got a page for the law firm that hosts the blog, all of those pages are going to start to get built out, so there’s more information about all of them: about the authors, about the firm, about the blog, links to social media, all of that. So, a lot of work going on, a lot in store for the coming months.
Kevin O’Keefe: I think we wanted to share with everyone the bloggers that are joining. So this week, Bob and I both saw Doug Berman sign up
very organically, nobody reached out to him. Well, I’m going, oh my God, that’s a rockstar in legal blogging history. “Sentencing Law and Policy.” If you don’t know him, he’s a professor. He’s a professor at Ohio State?
Bob Ambrogi: I think so.
Kevin O’Keefe: It was a big enough name so we chatted this afternoon. As these people are coming on, these lawyers that are bloggers, that are influencers in their space, they’re setting the standard for news in their space. Let’s make certain that they get a nice profile in LexBlog, both as to themselves and their blog, and let’s share with the world. So you are going to start to see things on Twitter and Facebook and Linkedin, some of the bloggers that are joining the LexBlog network along the way, as examples for the larger firms that can have individual lawyers who are
going to hear about it and maybe run into somebody’s office and create some problems for the firm. But I think we want to make it as easy as possible for them to join up and sign up, and then Bob’s also, it’ll become healthy tension now between publishing and products and technology here at LexBlog as to what I can get done and how can I get it done and it will probably start to be like me. The number one frustration in his
life will be that it can never be done soon enough and fast enough.
Bob Ambrogi: I’ve already experienced that.
Kevin O’Keefe: Which is good. Which is great for us.
Bob Ambrogi: It’s a really good team. Just a great team of people working out here in Seattle and few other places around the country as well. But a great team here in the office.
Kevin O’Keefe: They’re very committed now that you’re on board to make greater use of the technology. They’re going to be more committed to doing more with it. The other thing is, I was just curious and it’s kind of going off LexBlog now at this point in time. You know, what we’ve seen recently, you read as much as I do, you read probably more than I do in technology, but I read a lot in innovation too. We can give a shout out to Clio today. I know they’re all, they have what? 350 people all traveled from Vancouver and then from Toronto and literally around the world because they had to bring their crew in from Europe. 350 people gathered in Whistler today and tomorrow for a couple days. Pretty cool to see that. I mean, what’s your take on a company going from zero to 350 people in this space in a relatively short period of time?
Bob Ambrogi: 10 years. I mean, Clio’s a unique story. It really is. You know, I, I followed Clio. I think I was one of the first people to ever write
about Clio back when they launched, and follow them closely ever since. There’s really no, in some ways, there’s sort of no other story quite like them in legal tech. I mean, other companies have gotten big, but over longer periods of time, other companies have been successful, but on a smaller scale, on a different scale. Clio is interesting because it’s moving in the direction of what some other companies are trying to do as
well. But to really become a platform, an ecosystem for practicing law, you know, they’re not just a practice management platform, they’re really trying to encourage the development of other apps. I was just a judge this year on their competition to develop, you know, the best new apps for their ecosystem. So very interesting stuff that they’re doing.
Kevin O’Keefe: What you’re sharing to realize is that companies in the legal space used to get bought out at a period of time for any number
of reasons. One, that the larger companies could leverage what they had and began to sell off it, or to get them out of business before it becomes too competitive. That’s probably not as doable anymore today because the ability to build technology and the ability to do major things maybe doesn’t take as much. So, I looked at the Clio, 350 people, now I commented back into to Jack Newton when he tweeted about it early this morning. But if that’s the success story built on integrity, authenticity, passion, energy, a lot of those things. At the same time, great companies like Thompson, they’re announcing layoffs, not necessarily because they could be failing across the entire company, but to become more streamlined. But you look at, Clio is now bigger than the Martindale-Hubbell division of LexisNexis at anytime that Martindale-Hubbell existed. Hundred and some year-old company before it went away of its own doing.
Bob Ambrogi: It still exists as part of internet brands.
Kevin O’Keefe: The brand exists. But there aren’t 200 people working on profiles and ratings and all that type of thing anymore, if 250 or 300. Look at what that company’s accomplished in that short period of time and it isn’t going away. It might be more likely to go public than it is to be to be acquired. Clio is more likely, and we’re just using them as an example, more than just them, but they’re more likely to have a CRM system that is all over large law and all over general counsel’s office and you know, communicating with large law in 10 years probably than anybody, if they wanted to.
Bob Ambrogi: Possibly, especially with their acquisition of Lexicata this year, which was a CRM system.
Kevin O’Keefe: Imagine the growth. I mean, if they’re growing at this speed, this is going to grow geometrically faster.
Bob Ambrogi: I certainly don’t like predicting 10 years down the road in legal technology at all, because 10 years ago if you had asked me anything about what’s going on right now I would have had it all wrong.
Kevin O’Keefe: I know that’s not true because I think it was last night or the night before we’re having a beer and, no, it was last night, and we’re having a pint at the Ale House in Bainbridge Island and I started to ask as I do, I just ask people questions about their past and more and more and more. And was like, when did you first start writing about this stuff on the web? It must have been all the way back to the first browser. And you’re going, no, there was no browser when I wrote about the Internet. So you pulled out your phone, and I wish we had it up right now, you pulled out your phone and I’m reading this and he’s telling lawyers– I mean, maybe you can capture it, but what did you tell lawyers at that date?
Bob Ambrogi: Basically, this is a 1994 I think it was and it was the first column I did. I used to do a syndicated column about why lawyers should
be on the Internet and this was syndicated in print because there were no lawyers on the Internet.
Kevin O’Keefe: And that was the amazing part because what site did this go on when you wrote this? And he goes, “it didn’t go on any site.”
Bob Ambrogi: It didn’t go on any site. It went on a bunch of bar publications, newspapers, but the whole point of it was, lawyers, pay attention to this. This is pretty cool. The Internet is something you’re gonna want to pay attention to. You can use it for marketing. You can use it for communication. You can use it for research, information, networking. That was all of that. Yeah. I mean, I’m not saying I predicted it because other people were talking about it, but I also at that point predicted that within about five years everybody would have it all figured out and
here we are many years later, still trying to worry about–
Kevin O’Keefe: When I read that first sentence– and I’ll get a copy of it and I’ll put it up– lawyers need to pay attention to this, because information is going to be available in ways it’s never been available before and people will be sharing information openly and you’ll have access to all this information, be able to search it. And just think about that. There was no mosaic running, so you couldn’t browse the Internet. There was no Google where you could do searches. There was none of this that existed.
Bob Ambrogi: One of the first ever web browsers built, was built by Tom Bruce at the Legal Information Institute in New York, which was built
because they had this vision of putting case law online. And they thought, and the web was just, the web was launched, what, ’93 or something. I think it was 92, 93, was the, not the Internet, but the web, and they had this idea that we need to come up with a graphical way for lawyers to be able to navigate this stuff because otherwise they’re not going to navigate it. Lawyers aren’t going to figure out all the gobbledygook texts
you have to use to navigate the Internet.
Kevin O’Keefe: Yeah. But it was fascinating to read that and realize, oh my God, this is 30, yeah, that’s twenty-some years ago, that you’re writing that and it’s relatively accurate. And I’m thinking, well, this has to have gone out in an email newsletter. It must’ve gone on a website. And he goes, no, I wrote this and it was a syndicated column that bar publications put up into their publications. And I’m thinking, that’s amazing. The last thing,
and it may not be the news of the day because it goes back to us being in Boston, but we really haven’t chatted about it in any way was us going over to Harvard Law School and talking to them on two things. The bigger one was the new scanning of all these cases. What was the date again?
Bob Ambrogi: I’d say 1658, I think it was. I think it was their first case, the Caselaw Access Project.
Kevin O’Keefe: 41 million pages of case law, that go all the way back to the precursor to the Maryland course, put online and they didn’t put it online just to search cases in the way we think of searching cases today, they put it online so that people could have access to this information and through artificial intelligence we could start to glean information from the data. You know, how maybe we won’t do research the way we did it
by using keyword searches and whatnot in the future. But what they did was to it out so that other people could have access to this so they could experiment with it with their own technology, their machine learning tools and whatnot. I was fascinated.
Bob Ambrogi: Yeah, fascinating. A huge, massive project in which they spent– Ravel Law was also the other participant in it and they had,
Ravel Law helped fund it and Harvard did the work, but they had a massive scanning project literally ripping apart these volumes of old law books. Basically every, virtually every, they think every case ever basically published or reported in the United States, back before we were the United States is now available through this project. Unprecedented in delivery of information online.
Kevin O’Keefe: The other thing we talked about was link rot, what they’re doing about it. I think people should be aware of the– Bob talked
about originally the insight and commentary that comes out from lawyers, but it goes away. So imagine a lawyer provided an insight and commentary on a subject and in five years it goes away. How could that happen? Well, they move from one law firm to another and the lawyer loses the rights to their stuff. They get the right to this stuff, but they lost the URL so nobody can find their stuff anymore anyway because all the links are dead. Law firms willy-nilly move around content. So they have a website developer that comes in and says, let’s do the blogs this
way or let’s do them that way. And the website developer doesn’t know anything about blogs or law blogs, other than it’s content to get SEO. So they don’t care if we lose the body of legal knowledge. Harvard is, they’re using some linking structure for professors, Perma.cc.
Bob Ambrogi: It’s Adam Ziegler and his crew over there who are building all this amazing stuff. Library Innovation Lab, is that what they call
it? But Perma.cc is just a way of just creating a permanent link to a permanent record of stuff that’s on the Internet so that if you cite it in a court case or whatever else or a brief, you don’t have a problem going back there a year and the sources aren’t there anymore.
Kevin O’Keefe: And what might happen at some point in time is that each lawyer will get a unique identifier or domain. So the way that blogs are presented today is that a larger firm, even a smaller firm, would have a blog where multiple lawyers are contributing to it. Why wouldn’t each lawyer have their own publication? Doesn’t have to be that they’re showcasing it independently. That blog would be independent on its own domain in the lawyer’s name or some unique identifier domain. And then those are curated together, like our syndication portals, that will
go back out in other ways. It could be a different way of publishing.
Bob Ambrogi: It sounds like we’re publishing on blockchain now.
Kevin O’Keefe: But it might be, because why would you want your content to disappear just because of some goofy technicalities along the
way?
Bob Ambrogi: I mean, tell me about it. I’ve been a victim of it because I wrote a column for 15 years for American Lawyer Media for the Web Watch column. I wrote a Web Watch column for a law technology news, all gone. It’s all gone. They took it all down.
Kevin O’Keefe: Look at Bloomberg. I mean, imagine a company like Bloomberg that didn’t have this thing called Bloomberg Law. When Bloomberg acquires BNA for a billion dollars and now they’re going to do all this great stuff in the law and have big law biz or whatever, they go out and get lawyers to contribute content. So I was asked at one point in time, would you contribute content to it? And then I decided, one, because I wanted to own the content and more, I just want to have more time to create original content for them, not to do it. A lot of the lawyers said, I’ll do it for the notoriety. So what happens is they share the stories that they write by email or otherwise, people cite the stories that they’ve written for presentations and in articles, and unbeknownst all those lawyers. somebody turned the lights off and the content went away. It’s borderline comical but the publisher thinks it’s normal. I don’t know what your take is on all of this.
Bob Ambrogi: I mean, I don’t think it’s normal. I think if you publish something on the representation that it’s going to be out there available to
the public, that it needs to stay out there available to the public. And if there is going to be something where you’re going to then take it down for some reason, I don’t know, whatever reason, maybe you’re going out of business, maybe you’re out of bandwidth, I don’t know, but at least notify the authors and say, this is going to happen and here’s what we can do to help you preserve it and make it continue to be available. But you
know the easiest way again, to avoid that problem is not to be published on those kinds of proprietary platforms. Get a blog, publish on a blog, make it part of the look and let’s come back to the LexBlog network. I mean, this is going to be here forever. This is not something we’re going to put up a paywall for.
Kevin O’Keefe: And using that as an example, a concrete example, I had written an article for a book for PLI. PLI emails me and says there’s a
problem with the link in the citation that you used in this article. And I had linked the Bloomberg Law and go, well, how can that be? It’s over there. And they said, it’s not. I had to go find the article in Google Archives because Bloomberg no longer had it available on search or anything and had to publish that article, with the authors permission, on LexBlog and then give them the link to LexBlog so that there was the link that worked back at PLI. So it is a crazy world. The other thing we did find out that Harvard that was good news for us is that we want to do a blogger conference this year and Harvard was up for it and so I think you will see a first in the history of LexBlog in 14 or 15 years, we’ll do a blogger conference. The first one will be in Boston, likely at Harvard, I probably shouldn’t say that without corresponding and getting them to agree on it, but they were
up for it.
Bob Ambrogi: They did seem interested. They more than seemed interested, they said they were interested.
Kevin O’Keefe: The likelihood that a guy could start a blog in a garage on an island, would be organizing in conjunction with Harvard, a blog
conferences is about one in a million. So I thought that was pretty good. Anything else? We, we could sit here– we should have brought beers. Now we can invite people over here for that. People in Seattle, we could have had them over for beers.
Bob Ambrogi: That’s right. Next time. No, I think we’ve covered enough for today. Your new office is falling apart. You need a higher class
office here, Kevin.
Kevin O’Keefe: WeWork has worked out incredibly, incredibly well. No, thanks for coming out. You’re back out.
Bob Ambrogi: I’ll be heading back to Boston tonight, but back soon.
Kevin O’Keefe: Thank you very much.
Bob Ambrogi: Thanks.