In an ongoing effort here at Stem, we’ve been tracking the growth of the “Law Practice Industry” category on LinkedIn. For a bit more than a year now, we’ve run periodic searches on Google to see how many profile pages are indexed which include the industry class ‘law practice industry’.

Predictably, but still impressively, that number continues to grow. June’s number now shows 840,000 people within the law practice industry. In reviewing these profiles, we see a very high percentage of those people are lawyers; although it is an industry class and not professional.

With all factors consistent on each dated sample, here’s how things have stacked up:

• April 2008: 118,000
• June 2008: 216,000
• December 2008: 406,000
• March 2009: 563,000
• June 2009: 840,000

So what’s new in the world of lawyers on LinkedIn? A couple of observations:

• Groups: From legal marketing and technology to practice-specific groups for almost any area of law you can think of, lawyers on LinkedIn are getting more value out of their network by engaging in discussion. Groups are being used for Job postings, vendor recommendations, general questions, and sharing articles and links.
• Applications: Applications are basically widgets; tools that allow you to add external data into your LinkedIn profile. Two popular amongst lawyers are the Slideshare Presentations app, which lets you share presentations; and the RSS feed display, where you can post the feed from your blog, JD Supra documents, or any other content you like.
• Company pages: Just as important as individual profiles are company pages within LinkedIn. For instance, Clark Wilson’s profile includes a description of the firm’s services, a snapshot of current and former employees, location and contact details, and interesting auto-generated statistics such as median age, gender split, and top schools. Savvy law firms and other companies in the industry recognize this as a valuable opportunity to sculpt their online image.

Want a quasi brave prediction? That 840K number is going to be well over a million profiles by September 1st.

And thank-you to Larry Bodine for his email request to update the numbers!

One of the groundwork slides in my referral networking session at ABA Techshow with Reid Trautz was Stem’s ongoing tracking of the “law practice industry” category on LinkedIn.  The slide quoted the number of profile pages indexed by Google on four different dates over the course of the last year. Those were:

• April 2008: 118,000
• June 2008: 216,000
• December 2008: 406,000
• March 2009: 563,000

And here is the associated graph:

The question I posed to attendees was this: What do you think these numbers are going to look like in a year’s time? two years? three years?  The point, of course, is that the adoption rate is skyrocketing. It’s also important to recognize that each of these profile pages was created by, and actively managed by, the participant’s effort.  Not a massive updating process by firms to keep their records current in a directory – but based upon actual participation.

For me, that’s the promise of the read write web.  And to those looking for proof of Susskind’s ideas within the 2009 Techshow keynote, look no further.

The second edition of Law Practice Magazine’s LegalWeb2.0 column is now online. This month, Doug Cornelius has authored a great roundup of the issues faced by law firms who block internal access to social media websites. His article, titled Online Social Networking: Is It a Productivity Bust or Boon for Law Firms? covers a broad range of issues, from productivity and virus exposure to bandwidth and brand monitoring.

A couple of additional notes I’d like to mention:

• First, there’s a nice web-only appendix on the magazine website that includes the comments received from the survey. I’m not sure how long this page will be available, so best to drop by this month.
• Second, a feature only blogging & the social web could provide, Doug has just posted his response to the survey process & the results. He also has a sample social networking/blogging policy for a law firm.  Both these items are worth checking out.
• Third, a big thanks goes out to David Lat and Above the Law for helping us get the word out about the survey.  ATL didn’t get a mention in the article, and that was an oversight. Chalk it up to the rookie column editor (me).
• Fourth, we can’t pin this on Big Law. The numbers were consistent across firms of all sizes. We segmented the results to isolate each of the firm size demographics, and the numbers were almost identical.
• Fifth, 45% of law firms blocking social networks surprises me, and also doesn’t surprise me. The sample size was admittedly pretty small, but the fact the percentages were so consistent across firm size gives me a bit more faith in the results. Even if that number drops to 33%, one-third of an industry blocking is still a big number.

Many thanks to Doug for putting this together. I’d like to encourage everyone to check out Doug’s article and review the materials noted above.

Larry Bodine notes the release of a legal industry statistics summary on his Law marketing portal. The document was put together by Margaret Grisdela, president of Legal Expert Connections.

The survey covers everything from the number of lawyers licensed to practice in the U.S., to the number of firms, size of firms, etc. It’s a very quick read, and packs a lot of information in one short summary.

More great legal web demographics! This time, Kevin O’Keefe and Lexblog have produced a detailed list of which Amlaw 200 law firms have started law blogs, and which providers they’re engaging. From the announcement:

• Of the firms on the 2006 AMLaw list (the number was a few below 200, as mergers have consolidated firms since the list first published), 38 firms were blogging;
• From those 38 firms, we found a total of 73 blogs;
• 55 of these blogs were firm branded (meaning they had the firm’s logo prominently displayed on the page). 18 were not branded, indicating that the lawyer was operating their blog independently of or at a distance from their firm;
• Of the 73 blogs, 32 belonged to LexBlog clients. The other 41 belonged to firms or attorneys that were not LexBlog clients, using either free blogging services or personal/firm domains;
  • 12 law firms were LexBlog clients using LexBlog’s platform and accompanying turnkey solution
  • Of the non-LexBlog client blogging firms, there were a range of other platforms used: 8 were using Blogger; 3 were using Typepad; 1 was using Justia; 1 was using WordPress; and 13 had their blogs published and hosted through other services or personal domains.

I guess congratulations to Kevin are in order!  Wow…

I am pleased to announce the first of what I hope to be many demographic lists for the legal web: a re-ranked list of the 2006 Global 100 Law Firms (originally published by The Lawyer) by the number of web pages indexed within the search engines.

The list was developed using Yahoo’s Site Explorer, and offers a rough count of web pages published on the principal website of each of the Global 100 law firms. It was developed as a rough comparison tool for large law firm websites, but please keep in mind the following caveats:

• The list only includes the principal website, and does not include content published on alternate domains or other content-based websites such as blogs. Firms who spread out their content offering similar to my hub-n-wheel approach will not be accurately counted.
• It does include some websites, typically those under 300 pages, whose content may be partially hidden or blocked from search engine indexing because of flash based design.
• There are only 99 firms represented because DLA Piper is included for both North American and European operations in The Lawyer’s original list. This list does not differentiate, and includes DLA Piper as a single entry.

Your comments and questions are welcome. And I reserve the right to correct or modify the list for issues of accuracy.