The ABA Journal has a report that's not going to please the new media developers at FindLaw..
In their article? "Bad Blogs"? they suggest ( we decided not to say accuse) that
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When Findlaw.com launched 15 hyperlocal, news-based blogs last winter, the legal blogosphere took note?and aim?at the alleged ?spam blogs.?
New York City-based lawyer Eric Turkewitz?s New York Personal Injury Law Blog shares the name with one sponsored by the Thomson Reuters legal information Web portal. He blasts the legal marketer for using popular law blog titles to promote lawyers in its directory rather than create legitimate forums to analyze and discuss the justice system.
The blogs?which don?t allow reader comments?are presented as local legal news websites and are not intended to serve as a platform for legal discourse, according to Thomson Reuters. But Turkewitz and fellow bloggers condemn the blogs for regurgitations of local accident reports and cases, followed by calls to action advising readers that an attorney may help them recover personal injury claims, and links to a list of lawyers that pay FindLaw for its marketing services.
Full article at http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/bad_blogs
Of course the ABA journal and real bloggers are correct .. legal publishers only see blogs, really, as a leader for marketing products or services
They still have that? 2003 fear that providing some really useful free information will send their revenues into free fall.
We'd just like to let the legal publishers know that this is the least of their worries.. revenues are going into freefall and will continue to do so and one of the many reasons is that you couldn't work out early enough how to integrate this new (now old) technology into your organisation and now you're paying the price.
We do note that Westlaw's new blog is reasonably useful and dare we say it,
even interesting, from time to time. Kluwer and CCH have also worked out blogs and are developing a fairly sophisticated series of blogs for their client base
Lexis Nexis though.. that's a different matter and by the time they work it out the world will have moved on
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