JD Scoop : JD Supra’s Blog : Content Publishing, Document Sharing, Expertise Marketing for Legal Professionals

Greetings again from the floor of the ABA TechShow in Chicago, where earlier I had the pleasure of meeting Jordan Furlong, in his own words: "a lawyer and legal journalist specializing in law practice innovation, legal business trends, and the changing landscape of the legal profession." (He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Bar Association's magazine National; you can keep up with his blog at http://law21.ca.)

Look for an upcoming article he kindly wrote for us - for you, really - regarding ways to craft posts to JD Supra's "The Scoop" section specifically with journalists in mind. I hope Jordan doesn't mind me sharing this funny story: apparently when he arrived at the TechShow and saw the JD Supra logo on all of our name tags, he assumed they belonged to employees. "That person works at JD Supra," he thought. "And that person. And that person" And so on.

Took him a while to realize JD Supra had sponsored the lanyard. I am here, though, and I most certainly do work for JD Supra. Next year we'll have a booth. In the meantime, if you are hoping to meet for a tour of our service or just a conversation, please feel free to call me directly on my cell phone (415-209-4138).

And if the ABA sponsorship has brought you to JD Supra, I say: welcome, thanks for visiting! I know you don't work for us, but we most certainly can work for you. Please join us!

Here is a brief roundup of some of the coverage we've seen since our launch earlier in the week. Thank you, editors, writers, bloggers, for starting conversations and spreading the good word. (For a comprehensive list of related links please see JD Supra's In the News page.)

- The Wall Street Journal Law Blog: "... JD Supra is a new site that allows lawyers of all stripes to post court docs, filings, articles, client alerts — anything relevant to a case, really — for others who are doing legal research. The homepage has a cool sidebar that keeps track of who’s contributing the most docs."

- ABA Law Journal: "... JD Supra also offers a free platform for attorneys and others involved in legal matters to market themselves and identify individuals with useful expertise. A search page allows them to look for relevant material by jurisdiction, subject matter and document type."

- National Post: "JD Supra launches the YouTube of law... Let the posting begin!"

- Justia Law, Technology, and Legal Marketing Blog: "... We are encouraging all of the law firms we work with to participate and share with JDSupra's law library. By working together we can help build a great new legal research library. This is a very nice start of a new free research service!"

- WisBlawg From the UW Law Library: "... It's not only that JD Supra is facilitating the sharing of legal content - there are other sites do that, like DocStoc or Scribd - but what makes it unique is that it is able to lend some authority to those documents by tying them to author profiles. As a librarian, I'm much more likely to rely on a source when I can verify the expertise of its author. [It's] quite ingenious actually."

- MyShingle.com: "... JD Supra gives solo and small firm lawyers a way to strut their stuff.  By posting documents, other lawyers can get a sense of what your work product is like.  And by uploading a document, you gain a listing in JD Supra , which is another way to gain visibility online."

One mention that generated an interesting conversation around the JD Supra virtual water cooler comes from LawyerKM: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms. The post - titled "Is JD Supra inter-law firm Knowledge Management?" - asks: "are any firms going to share the good stuff — the “intellectual capital” that really gives them the competitive advantage over the other firms out there?"

Two days into our launch and we're thrilled to see a question such as this one. We hope that this is not just the beginning of a worthwhile dialog about Knowledge Management but also the start of a conversation that goes to the very heart of it all: the way we value information today in the face of dramatic technological innovation (ie., web and internet and the technologies they bring forth).

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[Finally, taking a page from Tim Stanley's book (actually from the bottom of his Justia Law posting about JD Supra) here's what we're listening to today: Grateful Dead, live at Roscoe Maples Pavilion, Stanford University - Feb 9, 1973. Downloaded from the Internet Archive, streaming directly to our ears.]