Content More Robust Than Revenues for New LexMonitor Website
A new website launched Friday called LexMonitor features posts from legal blogs and journals that are aggregated by categories, making it easier to follow discussion about legal issues.
Kevin O’Keefe, president of the company that launched LexMonitor, says the venture has a goal of showcasing blogs and making the law more accessible. As for revenue, well, he doesn’t think the website will make much money, at least in the short term.
LexMonitor pulls content from nearly 2,000 sources and 5,000 professional authors, according to the website’s description of itself. Readers can choose categories that interest them, such as areas of law practice or law schools. They can also subscribe to feeds that are global or focused on points of discussion.
The aim, O’Keefe says, is to highlight timely topics that are being discussed by bloggers, whose profiles are available in an alphabetical list on the website.
The day after the U.S. Supreme Court decided three cases and granted cert in seven others, for example, LexMonitor’s home page featured discussion of the cases on blogs ranging from SCOTUSblog to the Texas criminal law blog Grits for Breakfast.
LexMonitor is owned and operated by LexBlog, which helps lawyers create their own blogs and market their practice online.
O’Keefe, the president of LexBlog, says the new site is aimed both at lawyers and the general public. A practicing lawyer who is working on a brief, for example, may want to follow relevant tags or searches relating to the subject. Nonlawyers can learn more about the law by following the discussion threads.
“I think if we can get the law out there in a more meaningful way for people, both lawyers and the public, we can advance the law by highlighting legal discussion,” he says. “I think that’s all very positive for our profession. It puts some transparency on what lawyers are doing.”
O’Keefe says the website will look “dramatically different” in the next year as it incorporates changes based on reader feedback. “We’re in the listening stage,” he says. “This is just the tip of the iceberg. There will be a lot more coming.”
LexMonitor is already receiving kudos from some reviewers. Legal Blog Watch calls the topical channels “the stand-out feature of the site.” The Law Firm Web Strategy blog says the threaded commentary from related blog posts on LexMonitor is the “killer feature.”
LexMonitor is staffed by two full-time editors. While it features some Google ads, the revenue is “negligible. I doubt those have generated a pitcher of beer,” O’Keefe says. “Those were put up just to demonstrate, to desensitize the audience that there could be ads, but we don’t expect to derive much revenue from LexMonitor anywhere in the near term.”
