We don’t build or manage all of our client’s websites here at Stem.  Sometimes it’s us at the controls, and sometimes we collaborate with the client’s in-house or local web developer.  It’s an arrangement that works quite well most of the time.

One situation where it can cause problems, however, is responding to a website that has been hacked.  Ignoring the fact that security measures should be in place prior (complex passwords, login lockdown protection, etc.), the speed at which you respond to a website that’s been hacked is absolutely critical. Especially when it comes to protecting that website’s search rankings.

Let me explain a bit more… One of the biggest hacking problems out there currently is a completely stealth operation; that is, once control of the website CMS is taken over by the hacker, hidden pieces of code are injected (or files uploaded that run outside the target site’s navigation structure). The intruder’s spam insertion is also completely invisible to site viewers without inspecting the webpage code.  The hacker’s motive? To strip off some of the target website’s trust & link value, and route it to another money making venture.

Now unfortunately, the way most Firms (& Webmasters) find out about this type of attack is that their pages almost entirely drop out of search engines.  Here’s a frequent scenario:

• someone complains that they can’t be found in Google;
• webmaster inspects & the hacked code snippets are found;
• panic;
• passwords are changed globally; and finally,
• better security measures are put in place.

The bigger problem now? Google & the other search engines believe you run a spam website!  Suffice to say, you don’t want the headache of cleaning your site code, manually removing spam URLs from Google, and ultimately submitting a re-inclusion request explaining to BigG your remedies & new security.  So now – with context – finding out about any hack ASAP & responding before the search engines can index that spam code is … critical.

One helpful solution we came across recently, almost accidentally, is using WatchThatPage.  WTP is a tool we normally use to alert us about client news items & events (sans-RSS…). This time though, WTP identified that the client’s webpage had changed and alerted us within an hour of the attack. Rather than on-page text changes, the hacked-code insertion was detected.  The client was alerted, and their local developer had the site fixes in place a few hours later.

The end result?  Not one page dropped out of the search engines!

So two lessons I’d like to pass along:

1. Website security needs be taken seriously: At the very least, do these two things: 1) add longer complex passwords (10 characters plus, no dictionary words); and 2) lockdown your CMS login – if you use WordPress, we highly recommend the plugin linked above.
2. Get an alert service to email you when your webpage code has changed:  WatchThatPage proved to be a big help; and it’s likely we’ll expand it’s use to more client websites in the future.

A couple of years ago, we launched LegalPubs.ca to aggregate RSS feeds from Canadian legal publishers. The site helps identify the latest books and products being offered, and is typically followed by law librarians who are tasked with making these purchases.  In an average month, the site shows around 5k products, and inspires around 1500 product clicks. Last month was typical, with those stats captured in the image below:

Given that the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) has around 500 members, which isn’t the website’s entire audience (but what I’ve always suspected to be the vast majority), the numbers aren’t all that bad. Pretty good, in fact.

But something that’s completely escaped me until now, is a point made in a recent email from the CALL vendors liaison committee, which referenced LegalPubs.ca as a tool to leverage RSS as a green strategy.  That is, using RSS to reduce all those paper advertisements funnelling into law libraries & law firms around the country.  Interesting.

The only way the premise works of course, is for Law Librarians to be using RSS for new product awareness. So the question becomes: Are we there yet? Honestly, I don’t know the full answer to that.  But the numbers above do point toward being ‘on our way‘; and unlike paper advertising, there are some click-through metrics to back it up.

This past Sunday I published my latest Web Law Connected column over at Slaw, titled “The Formal-to-Informal Rule of Lawyer Web Publishing“.

The title of month’s article is a bit of a misnomer, and my suggestion of a rule is a mental guideline more than anything. The basic premise is to be careful about taking raw unfiltered conversational exchanges online, and automating (RSS imports, Widgets) their re-publication to your business network. As stated in the article:

My formal-to-informal rule is simply that it’s always ok to route formal commentary to informal and conversational web tools; but that unfiltered, informal, or conversational tools should be considered a place of final destination.

For those who consistently stay on message, don’t mix their personal & business networks, or see little use for flippant or sarcastic comments, having a content routing strategy may make little difference. Unfortunately, I seem to fail those tests on a number of fronts. :)  But that’s ok. The important message here is self-reflection in an honest way, and recognizing when fail-safe measures are required.

As I said at the end of the article, I don’t know if everyone else needs a rule… but it makes sense to me. And if it raises awareness of potential problems with content routing, especially for those lawyers with more conservative clientele, then mission accomplished.

As an aside, I’ve altered my personal publishing routine, and will now try to coordinate new article releases to Stem’s JD Supra account. The rationale, for those interested, is two-fold. First, Canadian published content isn’t treated as nicely in the US search results (a.k.a. geo targeting), so I’m attempting to improve cross-border search exposure; and second, I want those JD Supra syndication partnerships to help increase content distribution.

I’m pleased to announce a new website for Stem, the DUI Lawyer Blog Watch!

Located at duiblogwatch.com, this site offers a one-page aggregation of the 50 most recent postings by attorneys blogging on the subject of DUI law. As of launch today, the number of blogs included was 54.

With some similarity to the Florida Lawyers Blog Watch site we launched in January, I would like to highlight how this site’s approach is slightly different, and perhaps improved. Rather than focusing on a particular region, the goal this time was to focus on an area of practice, that of DUI Law. In addition to including those blogs exclusively focused on DUI law, we’ve also included lawyers blogging on the broader subject of Criminal Law. These Criminal Law posts are then filtered to include only those posts that contain the terms ‘DUI’ or ‘DWI’, either in the subject or title of their post. … It’s an extra layer of filtering, but something we felt would keep the subject stream a bit more on topic.

Also once again, we’re sharing the spotlight with one of our clients. Stem client Lawrence Koplow, himself a Phoenix DUI lawyer who blogs at the Arizona DUI Defense Blog, will be helping me out as a co-contact point for the site. Very similar to the way West Palm Beach Lawyer Ron Chapman watches out for new Florida blogs to add, Lawrence will be doing the same for DUI bloggers.

Finally, the opportunity to be included in this website is once again free. Lawrence and I both welcome contact from those we might have missed in our original set of DUI blogs. All we need is the homepage of your blog, and the URL of your blog’s RSS feed!

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? :)

Where do I find the time? A common question for many lawyers… for just about ever subject, actually. Not billable? Sorry, no time.

Keeping perspective on personal productivity is an important issue. True, but what about down time? While the typical lawyer has less ‘social surplus’ (see video below) than the average person out there, most still have *some* time dictated by personal choice. If you’re not working, doing a family activity, sport, club/assoc. meeting, grocery shopping or laundry – what are you doing then? where do you escape?

Clay Shirky’s video from the Web 2.0 Expo (below) is thought provoking. Every hour can’t be accounted for under the category of “work productivity”. There’s a lot more optional time than any of us believe.

So for every law blogger, twitter user (yup that’s me), or social network participant out there who has to answer: ‘where do you find the time?’ … Tell them you’re being very productive, with your social surplus. And that many parts of the social web are both productive for business, and enjoyable.

Do lawyers watch TV? I suspect a few do.

[hat tip: Connie Crosby]

There have been a couple of recent additions to the Florida Lawyers Blog Watch, the blog commentary tracking site I’ve been working on with Stem client and Florida criminal attorney Ron Chapman. These two bring the total to 38:

• DIY Divorce in Florida
• Palm Beach County Family Law Blog

Also note worthy, I can see from the statistics that the RSS Feed for this site is being re-published by a number of law firms inside the firewall. Very smart… allowing lawyers in-house to scan the ongoing stream of blog posts without leaving the firm Intranet. That’s fantastic & creative usage from my perspective. What RSS can and should be used for! Well done.

What if you took all of the lawyer blogs within a given region, say Florida, and mixed them into a single location online? Well, ta-da! :) Let me introduce you to my latest RSS feed mixing effort – the Florida Lawyers Blog Watch.

I’ve wanted to create a website like this for a while. Something that tracks the latest lawyer blog commentary, but on a regional basis. Want to know what’s on the minds of Florida lawyers? This site will show you about three days worth of current topics, and more importantly, offers a quick 2-minute scan of the day’s headlines.

For me, publishing & mixing are the untold value of RSS. As I mentioned in a recent post, RSS needs to expand its boundries from the personal feed reader and create new context by placing sources together. I’m also a big believer in Author credit, so you’ll notice the blogroll on the right side of the website offers direct links to each of the Florida lawyer blogs the site tracks.

I want to thank Stem client and Florida lawyer Ron Chapman. Ron will serve as my regional lookout for any new lawyer blogs coming online, and also as a co-contact point for those wanting to be added to the site.

And finally, I’d like to point out that the full-text RSS feed for those blogs combined is available here. If you need to listen to what’s happening in Florida law and have an RSS reader, it’s an easy subscription choice. If you really wanted to get fancy, try monitoring specific topics or keywords by filtering the feed with a product like Feedrinse. Wonderful tool, IMO.

Hope everyone enjoys this website. A mobile version is in the works!

One of the biggest areas of unexplored territory in legal web marketing these days is the power of RSS, or real simple syndication.

I’ve written in the past on the use of RSS in law firms (see here and here), and how those in the legal industry can be better consumers of information using this technology. However, for those of us on the marketing side of things, the best opportunities for RSS right now are in publishing, not consuming.

A great example, Infolaw’s Nick Holmes over in the UK has mixed together the content of 13 different family law blogs into a single feed using Yahoo Pipes. Now, Nick has followed up in a comment saying this was ‘no big deal’, but I’ll tell you what is a big deal: the opportunity this type of feed mixing offers to law firms and their web presence.

Many law firms are slowly adopting and getting onto the RSS bandwagon. And that’s great! For firms that don’t currently offer it, I hope there’s a plan in place to syndicate soon. I guarantee you’ll be hearing a lot more about RSS in 2008.

Now that said, once you do have your content RSS enabled, the next obvious question is — what are you going to do with it?

Your firm website will offer those feeds, probably running through a tracking service like Feedburner to get a subscriber count. But then what?

This is where the mixing that Nick has done comes in. For another example, check out Stem’s feed mix of Canadian legal publications; it was created using Yahoo pipes too. The power comes from taking these feeds and combining (or mixing) them. Content can take a completely different flavour, and be directed at a completely different audience when using this technique.

And most important, be automated to extend the firm’s content reach with no further effort by lawyers or staff!

Law firms frequently put together cross-disciplinary service groups, either for a target industry, or a specific client. Imagine being able to take the various online commentary from your contributing internal groups, and combine it to create a new dedicated product. Or, imagine being able to filter everything the firm publishes for the keyword “environment” and publish it to a new online location, and then directing those clients interested in environmental issues.

For me, that’s why law firms should take notice. RSS is easy, it’s cheap, and is probably the most flexible new technology the web currently has to offer.