The Changing Face of Legal Research

Understanding Today's Challenges

At our firm, like so many others, we faced two major hurdles to success: Business development, and the high cost of legal research.

Business Development

As attorneys in today's competitive legal environment, we have to implement aggressive business development plans to grow our practices. We do many things to establish ourselves as reputable members of the legal community with niche expertise, with the goal of both retaining our current clients and expanding our client referral network. These activities require a lot of time, often at the expense of billable hours. It's an important investment, but like any investment, we all look for ways to put less of our own time and money on the table for a higher payoff.

It is no secret that today's lawyers are harnessing the power of the Internet to supplement their business development activities: the secret is that some are doing it with tremendous effect. The traditional playbook counsels us to secure a leadership position at a local bar organization, give speeches at trade association meetings, and update our law firm's website once or twice a year. But so many of us have learned through experience that yesterday's approaches aren't enough. Any referral-based practice, in law and other service industries, has to reach a broader audience than these traditional strategies provide. Today, savvy lawyers embrace technology and online tools to increase their credibility and expand their client base.

The firm's three legal blogs are one of our central business development initiatives, and we are not alone in this regard. According to the American Bar Association TechReport 2014, an estimated 10% of attorneys have legal blogs. This is equivalent to about 120,000 legal blogs, an astounding number.

Why so many legal blogs? For one reason, lawyers like us are often passionate about the work we do, and we want to share our knowledge and expertise with the community. Plus, when we're instrumental in an important case and have unique insights about the legal questions at issue, we want people to know about it. Blogs build the community of knowledge that we rely on, but we're also speaking to peers who may become colleagues or sources of those critical referrals. Publishing legal insights publicly is the best way to share experience we've developed in our practices, and even better when speaking directly to a community of peers. According to the ABA TechReport, nearly 40% of law firms report that blogging has resulted in clients or referrals. Solo practitioners continue to report the most success from blogging, with 60% reporting that they have received clients directly or from referrals as a result of blogging.

My firm's blogs serve as the central hub of our professional online presence. Our blogs give each of our practices a voice, help us to express our professional identity, insights and ideas, and connect us to the community of lawyers in our practices. Importantly, blogging has the potential to increase our client referral rates. Our hope is that existing and future clients will come to us for advice because of the valuable information we provide, and other attorneys who follow our blogs will refer work to us because we are a trusted authority in those areas of law.

That being said, with the right content in place there is still a major barrier: finding and connecting with the right audiences. Some may think that if you author a blog you will have automatic followers. If only it were that easy. Building a readership requires consistent effort and marketing to an audience that can be fragmented and hard to find. We have long-sought an easy way connect to a wider audience of people specifically interested in what we have to say.

Costly Research

As any lawyer knows, legal research is critical to what we do. As much as we may be expert in particular areas, it's impossible to practice across multiple disciplines without access to a legal research tool.

In fact, according to the ABA TechReport, lawyers spend nearly a fifth of their working hours conducting legal research, with solo practitioners spending 23% of their time researching. See, http://bit.ly/1DiVShZ. Yet there is a high cost associated with conducting this research. The traditional legal research sites have expansive libraries of legal research, but they can be prohibitively expensive, especially for some of the most important content like peer journals and related commentary. Clients are increasingly mandating cost-cutting for these types of expenses, so lawyers cannot afford to depend exclusively on expensive legal research databases, particularly with the emerging availability of free and reliable online resources.

In our practice, we spend many hours each day conducting research, with an increasing imperative to cut the cost of this expense. We've also relied on a variety of tools to help us stay abreast of news and trends, but many resources are spread across the Internet and require time and effort to hunt down. Others provide a lot of data, even relevant data, but too much of it was out of context. We began to look for a low-cost, simpler alternative for legal research.

Discovering a Powerful Online Tool

In this process, several of the same barriers to success kept emerging: How can we use our blogs as a catalyst for client referrals, while reaching the right sets of eyes and ears? How can we better establish our reputation in a credible way? How can we accomplish our legal research without expensive subscriptions?

For us, the answer to many of these challenges is Casetext, a free, online platform for legal commentary. Casetext is not just a static legal database. Rather, it is a place where we can both do our research and showcase our knowledge and expertise to the legal community, in the context of the primary legal research.

Casetext users can discover and share legal knowledge by searching millions of primary legal documents ' judicial opinions, statutes and regulations ' annotated with insights contributed by experienced attorneys. All of this community-sourced content is linked to real names and identities, both so users can develop their reputation through the quality of their contributions, and so researchers can assess the source of the analysis. By linking contributions to user profiles that highlight professional experience and substantive knowledge, attorneys can demonstrate thought leadership, connect with colleagues in their field, and develop their reputation among a community of peers.

Casetext has made it easier for us to highlight our expertise and enhance our reputation by integrating our existing law firm blogs on the platform. Every time we publish a new post on our blogs, it is also featured on Casetext, which means our commentary is:

1. Linked to the relevant cases and statutes we discuss in the post, becoming a part of the free legal research database used by over 300,000 lawyers and laypeople each month;
2. Featured on Casetext legal topic pages ' Business Law, Copyright, Appellate Practice, etc. ' followed by thousands of attorneys in those practice areas; and
3. Upvoted by peers in the legal community, which helps highlight the most useful content. If our post is among the best from that week, it's featured in e-mail digests to thousands of attorneys interested in the topics we discuss.

The placement of our expertise and content into this system has an enormous impact. Casetext has allowed us to take what we were already doing with our blogs (unlocking the valuable information we have from our practices), and connected us with the types of lawyers and other readers we wanted to reach with our ideas. More than 300 legal bloggers have asked to feature their blogs on Casetext over the last few months. By having our blogs incorporated as part of the larger Casetext platform, we've already seen increased readership and attention for our practices.

Knowing that the right people were reading our commentary eased my worries about other aspects of the overall marketing mix. With our blogs linked to our profiles on Casetext, we no longer had to worry about things like search engine optimization for our blogs. In addition, it made networking for client referrals easier since my professional profile on Casetext is rooted in my knowledge and expertise, unlike the other social networking sites many attorneys use (you can see my profile at http://bit.ly/1H7OdWf) . Plus, if nonlawyers are searching for the answers to their legal questions that include our practices, Casetext makes the information we put forth in our blogs easily discoverable. By regularly sharing our analysis of legal developments, we are positioning ourselves as a “go-to” firm in our practices.

When it comes to legal research, our practice has relied heavily on primary research resources, but the tools available are costly and my clients are less and less likely to cover the steep usage fees. Casetext doesn't strain client budgets ' in fact, it's free. And it links existing resources to relevant cases and statutes, making it much easier to find the legal analysis we are seeking. It makes sense for us to start our research here, supplementing with other resources, as needed.

Conclusion

Although Casetext is still in the early days, the community is taking off and a growing number of well-respected, experienced attorneys are posting their analysis on the platform. As we use it more and more to conduct research and share our own insights, we are finding it to be an invaluable place for attorneys to promote their practices and to engage in meaningful discussion for a wide variety of legal topics. Already, it has elevated many of the topics we regularly cover in our blogs. We expect that as the Casetext platform continues to grow and evolve, engagement will increase, opening a richer dialogue amongst the legal community. Casetext is at the cutting edge of an emerging ' and long overdue ' trend of harnessing the expertise of lawyers who are thought leaders in their practices by placing it into a relevant context on a usable platform.

Daniel J. O'Rielly is a partner at O'Rielly & Roche LLP in San Francisco, California. From its offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the firm focuses on its practices in Complex Litigation and Class Action Defense, Consumer Finance Litigation, Partner Departure Law, Commercial and International Arbitration, Commercial Litigation, and Consumer Litigation. You can follow his blogs at www.partnerdeparturelaw.com and www.commercialinternationalarbitration.com.

Executing a powerful business development plan is a challenge every attorney faces. For attorneys at small firms and with solo practices, doing it without breaking the bank is one of the biggest hurdles to a thriving practice.

Building a strong reputation in the legal community is the lynchpin of a burgeoning practice. This is not news to anyone. The stronger our peer networks and professional reputations, the better we're able secure new clients. Success, especially at smaller firms, depends on a high volume of referrals. And while there are now better ways to build your reputation that reach more people through less effort, we are regularly surprised by how few of our peers take advantage of them.

In a crowded market, we are always looking for ways to build our firm's reputation and set us apart as a leader in consumer finance litigation. Establishing our reputation as thought leaders has been essential to building our practice and stimulating referrals. We've invested a lot of time in authoring three blogs at the firm that mirror our three main practices ' California Consumer Finance Litigation, Partner Departure Law and Commercial and International Arbitration ' to share timely developments, trends, and insights in these practices. These blogs have become a significant source of new business for our practice. But our readership was limited, and we continued to search for a wider audience for what we knew was valuable commentary. If my colleagues and I were going to take the time to share our insights about the law to help attract new clients, we wanted to reach a broader community of attorneys and possible clients interested in our ideas. We found that Casetext, a free, community-sourced legal research tool, has helped us do just that.

Understanding Today's Challenges

At our firm, like so many others, we faced two major hurdles to success: Business development, and the high cost of legal research.

Business Development

As attorneys in today's competitive legal environment, we have to implement aggressive business development plans to grow our practices. We do many things to establish ourselves as reputable members of the legal community with niche expertise, with the goal of both retaining our current clients and expanding our client referral network. These activities require a lot of time, often at the expense of billable hours. It's an important investment, but like any investment, we all look for ways to put less of our own time and money on the table for a higher payoff.

It is no secret that today's lawyers are harnessing the power of the Internet to supplement their business development activities: the secret is that some are doing it with tremendous effect. The traditional playbook counsels us to secure a leadership position at a local bar organization, give speeches at trade association meetings, and update our law firm's website once or twice a year. But so many of us have learned through experience that yesterday's approaches aren't enough. Any referral-based practice, in law and other service industries, has to reach a broader audience than these traditional strategies provide. Today, savvy lawyers embrace technology and online tools to increase their credibility and expand their client base.

The firm's three legal blogs are one of our central business development initiatives, and we are not alone in this regard. According to the American Bar Association TechReport 2014, an estimated 10% of attorneys have legal blogs. This is equivalent to about 120,000 legal blogs, an astounding number.

Why so many legal blogs? For one reason, lawyers like us are often passionate about the work we do, and we want to share our knowledge and expertise with the community. Plus, when we're instrumental in an important case and have unique insights about the legal questions at issue, we want people to know about it. Blogs build the community of knowledge that we rely on, but we're also speaking to peers who may become colleagues or sources of those critical referrals. Publishing legal insights publicly is the best way to share experience we've developed in our practices, and even better when speaking directly to a community of peers. According to the ABA TechReport, nearly 40% of law firms report that blogging has resulted in clients or referrals. Solo practitioners continue to report the most success from blogging, with 60% reporting that they have received clients directly or from referrals as a result of blogging.

My firm's blogs serve as the central hub of our professional online presence. Our blogs give each of our practices a voice, help us to express our professional identity, insights and ideas, and connect us to the community of lawyers in our practices. Importantly, blogging has the potential to increase our client referral rates. Our hope is that existing and future clients will come to us for advice because of the valuable information we provide, and other attorneys who follow our blogs will refer work to us because we are a trusted authority in those areas of law.

That being said, with the right content in place there is still a major barrier: finding and connecting with the right audiences. Some may think that if you author a blog you will have automatic followers. If only it were that easy. Building a readership requires consistent effort and marketing to an audience that can be fragmented and hard to find. We have long-sought an easy way connect to a wider audience of people specifically interested in what we have to say.

Costly Research

As any lawyer knows, legal research is critical to what we do. As much as we may be expert in particular areas, it's impossible to practice across multiple disciplines without access to a legal research tool.

In fact, according to the ABA TechReport, lawyers spend nearly a fifth of their working hours conducting legal research, with solo practitioners spending 23% of their time researching. See, http://bit.ly/1DiVShZ. Yet there is a high cost associated with conducting this research. The traditional legal research sites have expansive libraries of legal research, but they can be prohibitively expensive, especially for some of the most important content like peer journals and related commentary. Clients are increasingly mandating cost-cutting for these types of expenses, so lawyers cannot afford to depend exclusively on expensive legal research databases, particularly with the emerging availability of free and reliable online resources.

In our practice, we spend many hours each day conducting research, with an increasing imperative to cut the cost of this expense. We've also relied on a variety of tools to help us stay abreast of news and trends, but many resources are spread across the Internet and require time and effort to hunt down. Others provide a lot of data, even relevant data, but too much of it was out of context. We began to look for a low-cost, simpler alternative for legal research.

Discovering a Powerful Online Tool

In this process, several of the same barriers to success kept emerging: How can we use our blogs as a catalyst for client referrals, while reaching the right sets of eyes and ears? How can we better establish our reputation in a credible way? How can we accomplish our legal research without expensive subscriptions?

For us, the answer to many of these challenges is Casetext, a free, online platform for legal commentary. Casetext is not just a static legal database. Rather, it is a place where we can both do our research and showcase our knowledge and expertise to the legal community, in the context of the primary legal research.

Casetext users can discover and share legal knowledge by searching millions of primary legal documents ' judicial opinions, statutes and regulations ' annotated with insights contributed by experienced attorneys. All of this community-sourced content is linked to real names and identities, both so users can develop their reputation through the quality of their contributions, and so researchers can assess the source of the analysis. By linking contributions to user profiles that highlight professional experience and substantive knowledge, attorneys can demonstrate thought leadership, connect with colleagues in their field, and develop their reputation among a community of peers.

Casetext has made it easier for us to highlight our expertise and enhance our reputation by integrating our existing law firm blogs on the platform. Every time we publish a new post on our blogs, it is also featured on Casetext, which means our commentary is:

1. Linked to the relevant cases and statutes we discuss in the post, becoming a part of the free legal research database used by over 300,000 lawyers and laypeople each month;
2. Featured on Casetext legal topic pages ' Business Law, Copyright, Appellate Practice, etc. ' followed by thousands of attorneys in those practice areas; and
3. Upvoted by peers in the legal community, which helps highlight the most useful content. If our post is among the best from that week, it's featured in e-mail digests to thousands of attorneys interested in the topics we discuss.

The placement of our expertise and content into this system has an enormous impact. Casetext has allowed us to take what we were already doing with our blogs (unlocking the valuable information we have from our practices), and connected us with the types of lawyers and other readers we wanted to reach with our ideas. More than 300 legal bloggers have asked to feature their blogs on Casetext over the last few months. By having our blogs incorporated as part of the larger Casetext platform, we've already seen increased readership and attention for our practices.

Knowing that the right people were reading our commentary eased my worries about other aspects of the overall marketing mix. With our blogs linked to our profiles on Casetext, we no longer had to worry about things like search engine optimization for our blogs. In addition, it made networking for client referrals easier since my professional profile on Casetext is rooted in my knowledge and expertise, unlike the other social networking sites many attorneys use (you can see my profile at http://bit.ly/1H7OdWf) . Plus, if nonlawyers are searching for the answers to their legal questions that include our practices, Casetext makes the information we put forth in our blogs easily discoverable. By regularly sharing our analysis of legal developments, we are positioning ourselves as a “go-to” firm in our practices.

When it comes to legal research, our practice has relied heavily on primary research resources, but the tools available are costly and my clients are less and less likely to cover the steep usage fees. Casetext doesn't strain client budgets ' in fact, it's free. And it links existing resources to relevant cases and statutes, making it much easier to find the legal analysis we are seeking. It makes sense for us to start our research here, supplementing with other resources, as needed.

Conclusion

Although Casetext is still in the early days, the community is taking off and a growing number of well-respected, experienced attorneys are posting their analysis on the platform. As we use it more and more to conduct research and share our own insights, we are finding it to be an invaluable place for attorneys to promote their practices and to engage in meaningful discussion for a wide variety of legal topics. Already, it has elevated many of the topics we regularly cover in our blogs. We expect that as the Casetext platform continues to grow and evolve, engagement will increase, opening a richer dialogue amongst the legal community. Casetext is at the cutting edge of an emerging ' and long overdue ' trend of harnessing the expertise of lawyers who are thought leaders in their practices by placing it into a relevant context on a usable platform.

Daniel J. O'Rielly is a partner at O'Rielly & Roche LLP in San Francisco, California. From its offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the firm focuses on its practices in Complex Litigation and Class Action Defense, Consumer Finance Litigation, Partner Departure Law, Commercial and International Arbitration, Commercial Litigation, and Consumer Litigation. You can follow his blogs at www.partnerdeparturelaw.com and www.commercialinternationalarbitration.com.