And so here we are – New Year’s Eve 2025, the end of an extraordinary and turbulent year whose passage many of us will be happy to celebrate, as we equally fervently welcome the hope and potential of 2026. It’s a time for looking back and reflecting – and also for handing out some awesome awards, but we’ll get to that shortly.
As you probably know, 2025 marks the 20th consecutive year in which your esteemed panel of judges has selected a small number of (mostly) Canadian online legal entities to receive a Canadian Law Blog Award (or Clawbie). So much has changed in that time – in the world, certainly, but also in the legal sector, within the legal profession, and in the legal marketing and information space.
We’d like to take a few moments to share with you some observations about what we’ve seen over the years, and where things stand today.
The Democratization of Legal Publishing
It’s difficult for any lawyer called to the bar within the last 20 years ago to fully appreciate how much the arrival of blogging in the early 2000s changed the legal sector. Before then, “legal publishing” was almost exclusively the domain of national companies (Butterworths, anyone? CCH? Canada Law Book?) and then international conglomerates. These corporations published textbooks, case reporters, and weekly newspapers, and their few competitors were mostly large entities like the Canadian Bar Association. Lawyers were consumers of legal information, not creators of it.
That all changed with blogging. Lawyers found a voice they didn’t even realize they had, and discovered the intoxicating thrill of getting their own views and assessments and analyses of legal issues out into the world, without corporate gatekeeping and its artificial scarcity of distribution. We take this for granted today, but it wasn’t always the case. So pour one out this evening for the lawyers and legal professionals (highlighted below) who broke this new ground and showed the legal profession that it had both the right and the capability to tell their clients, their markets, and the world what they thought about the law. We stand on their shoulders.
The Legitimization of Legal Marketing
Another feature of the pre-millennial legal profession was that in many ways, “marketing” was the legal business practice that dared not speak its name. Large law firm partners would reject marketing campaigns on the basis that their competitors in other firms might find it “unseemly.” (True story.) Lawyers have always been weird about promoting themselves – not because they didn’t think they were great lawyers (of course they did), but because of longstanding hangups in the professional culture about self-promotion.
The hard work of legal marketing professionals over the last two decades is the biggest reason why these attitudes have all but faded from the scene. But we believe blogging played a role too, because lawyers themselves were able to engage directly with their desired audiences and tell them what they thought they needed to know. And in so doing, they came to more fully understand the business obligations and opportunities of marketing your legal services – regardless of what anyone else might think.
The Flourishing of Canadian Legal Content
Legal blogging (or “blawgging,” as it was briefly known) was not brand new when Steve Matthews published the inaugural Clawbie Awards in 2006. Pioneers like Dennis Kennedy had been promoting legal blogs and bloggers in the US for several years, including Dennis’s year-end “Blawggie Awards.” The ever-popular Blawg Review also ran a series of year-end awards. But Canadian entries were a bit of a rare commodity, even though many great Canadian law blogs were generating terrific content week after week. Not for the first or last time, Canadian voices needed their own entity to avoid being overlooked.
Today, the Canadian legal publishing ecosystem is crowded, noisy, vibrant, diverse, and tremendously valuable. Lawyers and legal professionals all over the country write, speak, and video-record their views on what’s happening in the legal sector and what it means for lawyers, clients, and the general public. The Canadian “blawgosphere” (we’ll use the old term, even if it’s no longer completely accurate) is not just a tremendous resource for everyone interested in the law; it’s also a lot of fun to be around.
Like we said, this year marks our 20th anniversary of Clawbie awarding. And if you’ll forgive this brief suspension of our famous modesty – we feel pretty good about the contributions we’ve made over the years to that Canadian legal publishing ecosystem. All we ever wanted the Clawbies to do, was to tell Canadian legal professionals, hey: You have a voice! You have legitimate views and important insights, unique to this country and its legal system, and they deserve to be heard. It’s incredibly fulfilling for us to see how amazingly well the Canadian legal profession has heeded that message and embraced that opportunity.
What does the future hold? We can’t say. We believe very strongly that what we wrote last year – about the critical importance of truth-telling by lawyers in an age of misinformation and disinformation about the law and people’s rights to it – applies even more strongly now than it did back then. We want to encourage everyone reading this article, no matter your role in the legal sector, to step up and meet this challenge. Somebody has to stand up for what’s true and what’s just. Lawyers, this starts (and maybe ends) with you.
Beyond that? Well – it might perhaps be the case that after 20 years, the Canadian legal publishing ecosystem has more than enough momentum and strength to carry itself forward on its own, and that the Clawbie Awards might no longer be necessary. The world has changed in 20 years, and what we set out to encourage back in 2006 – diverse Canadian legal voices speaking openly and confidently online – has come to pass. Maybe our work here is done.
But we’ll see. The future could go any number of different directions, and maybe the evolving needs and demands of the Canadian legal sector in the years to come will mean the Clawbies will return, perhaps in a different form or manifested in a different way. We’re not closing or locking any doors today.
What we really want to do, before we finally turn the podium over to this year‘s winners, is to say: Thank you. Thank you for supporting the Clawbies for the last 20 years, as both producers of legal information, as nominators of your colleagues and co-workers, and as consumers of all the great content they’ve provided. Thank you for showing up here every New Year’s Eve for what we still like to call “not necessarily the most important awards of the year, but definitely the last to be handed out.”
It’s been a great ride, and we’re so glad, and so grateful, that you all came along.
À bientot?
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Please join us in celebrating the 2025 Clawbies winners!
1. 2025 Fodden Award
Find out who won at
Clawbies 2025: Announcing the 20th Anniversary Canadian Law Blog Awards
