POSTED: Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 1:00 am

BY: dmc-admin

Of the many things that can make you a proud Midwesterner, one of them might be that it’s home to one of the nation’s leading law-related blogs, Lawyerist.

That’s not just wishful thinking to lure advertisers. Aaron Street, the publisher of Lawyerist Media LLC in Minneapolis, explained that Avvo, the online attorney profile Web site, posts a list of the blawgs with the most traffic, as calculated by Alexa. On that list of about 300 blawgs, Lawyerist is number eight.

Street said about 15,000 legal professionals visit Lawyerist per month.

It’s phenomenal growth from when the blog first started. Lawyerist’s Editor-in-Chief, Samuel J. Glover, launched a blog in January 2007 named “Solo Small Tech.” As the name implies, it focused just on technology.

Glover, also of Samuel J. Glover & Associates LLC in Minneapolis, changed the blog’s name to Lawyerist after about a year and a half because he wanted to add other topics, including marketing, career development and practice management, into the mix.

A few months later, Street, a classmate from the University of Minnesota Law School, contacted him with the idea of expanding the blog in multiple ways.

“We had lunch in February and incorporated in March 1, 2009,” Street recalled.

Lawyerist has been successful because it’s “a very different approach to the law practice blog than anyone was really doing at the time,” Glover said.

“I’m maybe a little more outspoken than a lot of the other law bloggers out there. If I think a piece of software sucks, I’m going to say it sucks.

He continued, “I think the blog came from an honest place: ‘These are some of things I’m doing to get my practice off the ground, and keep it going.’ It was a much more hands-on approach. There are a lot of law bloggers out there who are writing about law practice, but are no longer practicing law. An advantage I have is [that] when I say I like a scanner, it’s because I use it every single day.”

Among the changes they made in March was to add more contributors.

Glover had already relied on them occasionally before the creation of Lawyerist Media LLC.

“But when Aaron and I partnered up, we decided we wanted to go from me writing everything, whenever I had time to post, and make it a five-, six- or even seven-day-a week blog. It was way too much work for me to do on my own. So we recruited various other contributors to help us out. They get great exposure; we get great content; everybody wins.”

Another change was to start soliciting advertisers.

Although the general feedback they’ve received has been almost entirely positive, some have been critical of that decision. It’s probably cost them a few readers, Glover conceded.

Still, he’s excited about how blawging has skyrocketed in popularity.

“I think it’s exciting to see lawyers taking hold of technology and using it both to educate people, get business and build their practices,” he said. “Blogging is really just an easy way to get content out on the Web, and because it’s easier, more lawyers are actually doing it. Anything that encourages lawyers to share information is good. Blogging has been a vehicle to encourage that, because you don’t have to be a Web master to do it.”

The ideas for Lawyerist’s content come from other blawgs, or from reader e-mails.

“But a lot of them [ideas] just come out of my head,” said Glover. “I love solo practice and the practice of law generally. There’s so much to talk about – I have way more in my head than I could ever find the time to write about.”

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