One of Stem Legal’s first clients was Quickscribe; a local BC company who offers an exceptional hard copy and web-based update service for provincial legislation. Although the vast majority of Stem clients are lawyers or law firms, I’ve always tried to make a few exceptions, especially when the concept was interesting or the people enjoyable to work with. Mike Pasta & Quickscribe fit the bill on both parts.
But my personal satisfaction aside, Quickscribe also represented a big challenge – they were competing with the BC Government. Despite the fact that Quickscribe was reporting legislative changes faster, innovating faster technologically (seen the BC Legislation Portal?), and had better pricing, they have an uphill challenge to compete for exposure. And that’s ok; the fact that an awareness challenge exists isn’t a surprise to anyone in the Quickscribe camp. But strategy wise, what was needed was to quantify the advantages that Quickscribe offered. We needed an independent third party.
Now this isn’t to say the there aren’t a few blemishes exposed on the part of both products … there clearly are. But in the end, and after a few discussions with Mike, this report ends up siding with Quickscribe as a solid alternative. And the fact that we’re exposing some of the challenges to delivering a better product? Let’s just call that transparency, and a bit of added integrity to the process.
The crew over at law blog developer Lexblog have launched a new legal blog aggregator, Lexmonitor. It’s pretty cool! It’s also the type of tool that will help sell RSS technology within the legal industry.
For the unsavvy RSS user, it looks like a regular website with a massive amount of industry-based content, a big newspaper. And for the RSS-power user, its a series of practice specific vertical feeds & practice management feed mixes that can help save time monitoring blog content. Some of this is already available with Justia’s blog search or in a more limited scope, Stem’s Florida Lawyers Blog Watch.
But Lexmonitor, in my opinion, is a step-up. It has a cleaner interface, better connections to blog authors, and the killer feature — threaded commentary of related blog posts! There’s also a bit of a human touch, as Rob La Gatta will be running an editorial ‘buzz’ blog along side the automated features.
I’m also happy to report Lexmonitor has solid Canadian content, as I worked with Lexblog’s Rob La Gatta to ensure all of our blogs on Lawblogs.ca were included. … A little benefit from having our northwest neighbours at lexblog so close. :)
Congrats to Kevin & his team. Good to get this finally launched, right guys? :)
As of tomorrow, that post of Kevin’s will be 2 months old. And I’m here to tell you today, that the number of LinkedIn Lawyers has spiked to an incredible 216,000!
Regardless of Kevin’s methodology (read his post for a full rationale on his technique), that exact same search shows an increase of 98,000 profiles in just two months. That’s simply remarkable. At that pace, we could expect to see LinkedIn exceed a half-million lawyer profiles before the end of the year.
Not enough can be said about what John brings to the table for JD Supra. Having spent the past 12 years with Summation, John knows the legal industry. He’s experienced moving from a small core team to building a company into an industry leader. But beyond all that project management and sales expertise, John also believes in the JD Supra vision. He understands the value of substantive work product, and what it reflects about legal practitioners.
Having spent some time with John down in San Francisco recently, I’d also say that John’s a true entrepreneur and a genuinely nice guy. Attributes that fit well with the rest of the JD Supra team.
Following up on a recent Stem news item, I’d like to also offer a more informal blogging welcome to new client Koplow & Patane P.L.L.C. Based out of Phoenix, Arizona, the firm was founded by partners Lawrence Koplow and Angelo Patane, with core areas of practice including both Arizona DUI law and Arizona Personal Injury.
From the release:
Lawrence Koplow is a former DUI and Vehicular Crimes prosecutor with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. A founding partner of Koplow & Patane P.L.L.C, Mr. Koplow now uses this experience for the benefit of clients. His criminal practice focuses exclusively on working as an Arizona DUI Lawyer, including a variety of potentially related vehicular crimes involving: vehicular homicide, vehicular assault, endangerment and leaving the scene of the accident. More information about Mr. Koplow’s services can be found on his Arizona DUI Center website at www.arizonaduicenter.com. His opinions and commentary on issues related to Arizona DUI law can be found on his Arizona DUI Defense Blog – located at duiblog.arizonaduicenter.com.
Angelo Patane offers clients more than 15 years of experience in injury and insurance bad faith matters, and a notable track record of success. His professional accomplishments include collaborating on a 1.5 Billion dollar plaintiff judgement, the largest in Arizona history; and also includes the largest verdict in a short trial, a special jury trial program in Maricopa County, Arizona. In 2000, Mr. Patane was named Trial Attorney of the Year by Farmers Insurance. A full description of Mr. Patane’s services are available on his Arizona Personal Injury website at www.azinjuryfirm.com. Ongoing commentary of Arizona personal injury issues can be found on Mr. Patane’s newly launched blog – the Arizona Personal Injury & Insurance Bad Faith Blog – located at www.azinjuryblog.com.
Lawrence & Angelo – It’s great to have you aboard. I’m really looking forward to working with you!
Launched in January, the Florida Lawyers Blog Watch offers a single page aggregation of the 50 most recent postings by Florida Attorneys. Typically that runs about three days worth of posts, and now comes from 39 different blogs. If you know of others, please relay us the information. We’re looking to expand the site’s coverage!
At long last, I’m home & back to blogging. During the second half of May, I spent 10 of 15 days on the road. Great experiences, but certainly tough on the personal time management equation.
In mid-May, I attended my inaugural set of ABA LPM meetings in Santa Fe. The big news there was the opening of the magazine Archives for the section’s Law Practice Magazine, where council voted unanimously in favour. And considering my involvement with the magazine’s Ed Board will be to add an interactive web-spin to their offerings, this was a great sign for the future.
I then spent the better part of last week at a planning retreat with Stem client & legal document sharing service JD Supra. It was the first time the entire virtual team has gathered, and the meetings were exceptionally productive. Expect more JD Supra news in the weeks ahead.
But suffice to say, my personal blogging, both here and over at the VLLB, has taken a hit… I’m hoping some of that backlog will be taken care of in the coming week. Tomorrow I’m attending the Vancouver LMA’s HELM Awards, where I recently acted as a Judge, but after that – I’m re-dedicating myself to the keyboard!
