JD Scoop

Here's a look at some of the blog and news coverage re: Friday's launch of Legal Updates - JD Supra's new application to deliver legal information to everyone on LinkedIn, and to allow lawyers to seamlessly integrate their legal expertise on the professional social network:

- JD Supra is Now Linked Up to LinkedIn (Robert Ambrogi)

"When you consider that LinkedIn has more than 70 million members and that its members are almost all professionals and businesspeople, the integration of JD Supra could be a real game changer for lawyers on LinkedIn."

- JD Supra & LinkedIn: Together At Last (Martha Sperry)

"Certain things just go together. Peanut butter and jelly. Salt and pepper. Burns and Allen... What makes the JD Supra / LinkedIn union even more interesting is the application's creation of a vast information repository for LinkedIn members, an inward streaming resource that brings content from JD Supra contributors to potentially interested LinkedIn members based on their profile metadata."

- JD Supra and LinkedIn Launch 'Legal Updates' to Create World's Largest Legal Content Distribution Network (Gina Rubel)

"...LinkedIn, the premiere social networking platform used by more than 70 million professionals, has added JD Supra's Legal Updates to its exclusive list of sixteen Intelligent Applications, which also include Reading List by Amazon and Presentation by Google."

JDSupra and LinkedIn: Like Peanut Butter and Chocolate (Jayne Navarre)

"...I predict that just about EVERYONE on LinkedIn will have a good reason to add Legal Updates, the new application from JDSupra, to deliver legal industry content to their landing page."

Additional:

• JD Supra Teams with LinkedIn so Users Can Share Legal Content (ABA Journal)
• JD Supra and LinkedIn: A Power Couple? (Stephen Seckler)
  
• Networking Lawyers! JD Supra & LinkedIn Announce New "Legal Updates" Feature (Megan Erickson)
  
• JD Supra & LinkedIn Launch "Legal Updates" - New Way to Keep Track... (Daniel Schwartz)
• JD Supra Powers New LinkedIn Legal Updates (Steve Matthews)
• LinkedIn Partners with JD Supra to Launch New Legal App (Stephen Fairley)
• LinkedIn Now Offers JD Supra App (Larry Bodine)
  
• LinkedIn Changes the World (Lori Ruff)
• JOB SEEKERS: use JD Supra's Legal Updates application on LinkedIn to learn about practice areas (Amanda Ellis)

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Related:

- Add Legal Updates on LinkedIn
- Video: Introducing Legal Updates...
- JD Supra and LinkedIn Launch 'Legal Updates' to Create World's Largest... (Business Wire)
- The JD Supra- LinkedIn Story (PDF) | Media & Press Info

I've been holding on to last week's "The Media Equation" column by David Carr in the The New York Times: The Fall and Rise of Media - worth a read if you haven't yet seen to it.

Like many of us in the Digital Age, I usually do the equivalent of clip a piece like this one: tweet the link, share it on Facebook, bookmark it on delicious or digg. Then I'm done; on to the next article, the next post, the next nugget of information.

But for the past week this particular article has lingered on my desktop in an open browser, not ready to be archived.

On one level, it is personal: I am the son of an old-school, print media journalist - a South African journalist who happened to chronicle life in that country during some of its most turbulent years (1960s to '90s). I will forever remember (and miss) the typewriter sounds of a busy newsroom, and the smell of ink and paper and hot metal as important news went to print.

Yet, there is optimism in Carr's piece about the changing media landscape. ("...cabals of bright young things are watching all the disruption with more than an academic interest. Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago.")

A few standout statements from The Fall and Rise of Media:

"...the supply of both editorial and advertising content more or less doubles every year.

"...on the Web, pretty good -- or even not terrible -- is often good enough."

"Certain stalwart brands will survive and even thrive because of a new scarcity of quality content for niche audiences that demand more than generic information."

Especially the last half at that last sentence:

...a new scarcity of quality content for niche audiences that demand more than generic information.

When you overlook the carnage that is the decline of traditional media ("if you ignore all the collateral gore"), you see opportunity.

This includes opportunity for lawyers and law firms - who are without question terrific sources of expertise (and that missing quality content) at a time when the best you can say about most user-generated content (the golden child of new media) is: "pretty good -- or even not terrible -- is often good enough."  

I am unsure how many lawyers and law firms understand their place in this changing landscape - and see the opportunity available to them.

Quality Content for Niche Audiences

Our efforts at JD Supra have always been informed by the understanding that lawyers are prolific generators of top-quality written work; our job is, among other things, to place that work in front of the niche audience(s) who want to read it.

Your expertise - covering every endeavor, every profession and industry, showcased in the form of client alerts, articles, newsletters, blog posts, court documents (incl. favorable decisions) - holds wide interest among numerous people. Business owners, managers, consumers, parents, employees, musicians, politicians, entrepreneurs, doctors, patients, homebuyers, landlords, tenants, scientists, manufacturers, immigrants, and on and on and on.

 So what does the changing media landscape mean for lawyers and law firms? Simply this: participate.

Participate in the new media landscape. In the words of Jordan Furlong (repeated here by me, frequently): think like an editor.

Start posting your analysis, commentary, news alerts and other legal content online. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, JD Supra, even YouTube: these are your tools. An audience is waiting. 

What you bring to your "niche" (read:" target") audience can help fill a void currently filled, in no small way, by content that is either "pretty good" or, more likely, "not terrible."

Lawyers and law firms can do better than that.

...

Recently the Electronic Privacy Information Center joined the ranks at JD Supra. To learn more about this public interest group, please visit their profile page. One of EPIC's first posted documents was a Complaint for Injunctive Relief challenging the Federal Trade Commission in its actions to do with the Google-Doubleclick merger (for more details, download the document here.) The Complaint was tagged as newsworthy and as a result appeared in our Hot Document section - JD Supra's media source of the latest newsworthy filings (also available via RSS feed).

Within two hours of uploading, Executive Director Marc Rotenberg was on the phone with someone from the National Law Journal, who had found the Complaint on JD Supra. (We learned this from Mr. Rotenberg, who emailed us a note of thanks.) The result: a mention in the NLJ's IN BRIEF for March 24, 2008, titled "Suit centers on possible conflict in Google deal." (The piece is available here with paid NLJ subscription.)

That, in a nutshell, is JD Supra's Hot Documents section at work. If you are uploading something that deserves media attention, we encourage you to tag it as a "Hot Document."  And, before you prepare document summaries with the media in mind, be sure to read Jordan Furlong's writing tips on the subject. Give content. Get noticed.

Tomorrow: Content marketing with consumers in mind. What's the real question you should be asking yourself?