The ABA Center for Innovation released a survey that will hopefully assist you with determining what resources you, the legal professional, should turn to and how best to access those materials when answering this question: Just how and where do legal professionals learn about innovation and strategy?
This project was produced by Amanda Leigh Brown, a young lawyer turned legal technologist, while seconded to Microsoft’s Corporate Legal Department through the ABA Center for Innovation Fellows program. The Center for Innovation is a group of creative thinkers gathered to develop and launch new projects to address critical needs in the legal sector. Microsoft helped to underwrite the survey.
Would you like to know what resources are available to you and the legal profession that are focused on innovation and the practice of law? Want to know the way to access that information?
In this project, the data was collected through August 1, 2018. You can access the source objects used for this blog here. The survey remained open about a month and was distributed by word of mouth and social media. In order to broaden the responses, several influencers, such as Robert Ambrogi, Ron Friedmann and TechnoLawyers, were also asked to spread the word amongst their networks. The resultant responders were divided as follows:
The two methods of preferred content format were portals and newsletters at 104 and 102 respectively with blogs coming in at 87. Podcasts and other audio/video came in a distant 4th at 48 and newspapers, yes, newspapers following at 26. Smaller firms preferred newsletters while larger firms preferred portals and content aggregators.
When it came time to determine whether people were reading the content or listening, I was surprised to find out that twice as many people listen to content via podcasts, video or other audio than reading items such as blogs and newsletters. Perhaps I should have made this a podcast!
All these graphs allow you to interact with the survey and click on the various filters to dive deeper into the data. to determine who is reading which blog. For example, let’s see who is reading 3 Geeks and a Law Blog. When digging deeper, most people are reading “Other” or “None.” What this tells me is that no one blog or podcast has risen to the top of the heap yet on Blogs.
Moving to Portals and Content Aggregators, the clear leaders tend to be “Above the Law, Law360, ABA Journal and TechnoLawyers” particularly from Associates. Associates. It appears, turn to Twitter for their main source of information.
Newsletters on the top of the heap are Law360 and TechnoLawyer, both opt-in and usually full of varied legal news.
Finally, some noteworthy resources include the following.
Personally, I am an avid follower of many of these, including the ACEDS newsletter, Bits + Bytes. Some I must admit, I have never heard of, so this was very educational for me to go through this survey. I encourage you to determine how you best get your news and look through some of these offerings as you may be missing the best sources out there. I would be curious as to your comments on this blog. Please send comments to [email protected].
Gayle has held a variety of positions including Marketing Director at Degen, Blanchard and Nash, a large law firm located in New Orleans, and has served as a marketing strategist for numerous legal software providers. Gayle was also the former trial technician for the federal public defenders Hells Angels case in Seattle, WA.
Throughout her career, Gayle has been a speaker at numerous conferences ranging from the New Zealand Law Society, the ABA, Access to Justice Foundation as well as local organizations such as bar associations and NBI CLE offerings.
She can be reached at [email protected] or @gaylemoconnor.
She is also an avid Harley rider.