I found LawLink to be like an elevator pitch: "Let's do LinkedIn just for lawyers." As Steve Choi pointed out, there are only a few thousand members. It is shame that he did not give them a reason to come back after they joined.
Look at the ABA's LawLink site: www.abanet.org/lawlink/. "Lawlink provides quick access to important legal information from the American Bar Association and other resources. Each site is selected and evaluated by a member of the ABA's Legal Technology Resource Center staff. " Now that is information that I would come back for.
Look at the LawLink for New South Wales: http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/ There is information worth coming back for. (If I was in New South Wales)
Steven said that I should promote the blog in the LawLink classifieds. The classifieds look pathetic with most of them devoid of entries. I would be embarrassed to post something in there. Frankly, I found the existence of a dating section in the classifieds section to be repulsive for site that is targeted for professional relationships. Yes lawyers need love, but it seems to clash with the LawLink Mission:
• To help attorneys build professional relationships with other attorneys.I would be interested if there were an aggregation of blawgs on the site. That would provide at least some substance.
• To help attorneys leverage their existing professional relationships.
LinkedIn provides a way for you to upload you contacts and see who in the network. It also matches other contacts in the network you may know based on college and law school attendance. LawLink does not provide a way to start that hunt for people you know.
To fair to LawLink, LinkedIn is also pretty boring. There is not much to do except see if anyone new has joined the network and answer questions.
I missed the early days of LinkedIn and Facebook, so I do not know how they got people to come back after their first look. I assume that there was some interesting information, cool feature or string of communication that caught their eye.
I think LawLink suffers from the blank wiki page syndrome. You can't just put up a blank wiki and expect people to contribute. You can't just put up an empty social site and expect people to be social (especially lawyers).
Steven says that LawLink will be rolling out new features. I am still waiting for something to catch my eye to get me to go back.
I think an aggregation of blawgs is a great idea! How do you envision the lay-out of the page to look? Off the top of my head, I'm thinking a page of 20 or more blawggers with their most recent title and a short excerpt that links over to the blawg page. I believe there are at least 10 blawggers that have joined LawLink. Would you be interested in participating?
ReplyDeleteBTW, our next feature will be Law Groups similar to the groups you see on Facebook. Attorneys will be able to form Open, Private and Secret Groups based on Law Firms, Practice Areas, Geography, Common Interests etc. Communications between group members can be completely private. We hope to complete this feature by the end of October.
Note: The classifieds get a large number of hits by members who are curious. Sure there aren't many listings, but the listings that are there get read by quite a number of attorneys according to our web stats. A lot of advertisers would kill for 2,000 attorney eyeballs for the low, low cost of free. The fact is that almost every attorney who signs up, checks out the classifieds at least once.
Thanks for the input!
Steven Choi -- Co-Founder LawLink