Robert Ambrogi Blog
After years of writing about the launches of other companies’ legal technology products, I am proud to announce one of my own: the LawNext Legal Technology Directory, which we hope will become the most trusted source of legal tech products in the market.
Consider this our MVP. Our goal is to continue to develop this into a comprehensive directory of products, reviews, learning resources, and more, where buyers can find trusted information to guide their purchases, and where vendors can help their products be discovered and distinguished.
This launch is just a beginning. We need you – the buyers and sellers of legal tech products – to make it complete:
- Add a review. Peer reviews are the most-trusted form of buying information. Take a moment to review a legal tech product you use. Help guide others in evaluating products.
- List your products. Several hundred companies listed their products in advance of our launch. Now we invite other vendors to add yours. There is no cost, and you get to ensure that your product listing is accurate and complete.
The Need as We See It
Legal technology is surging, with products launching to the market virtually every day, many with similar or overlapping functionality. This glut of products is a good thing in many ways. However, for both buyers and vendors, it also presents challenges.
For buyers, there is a lack of resources to help them find and evaluate the products they need – particularly trusted, objective resources with domain expertise in legal tech. We want to enable legal tech consumers to be:
- More informed in their buying decisions, by providing substantive information on products’ purpose, features and functionality, driven by the editorial and domain expertise of LawSites blog.
- More confident in their buying decisions, by providing trusted, verified reviews from peers and experts.
For vendors, it is increasingly difficult for their products to stand out or even be found. For them, the directory can serve as a discovery platform, helping vendors:
- Be more easily discovered by buyers, through a directory that is intuitively organized – not just by product categories, but by how legal professionals work.
- Better stand out among their competitors, through a directory that allows them to highlight their unique features and capabilities.
- Be on a level playing field, because adding basic listings will always be free, not pay-to-play.
Other directories exist, of course. Generic technology review sites include some legal tech products, but lack domain expertise, resulting in incomplete listings and sometimes confusing categorization. Other legal tech directories tend to focus only on specific segments of the market (such as BigLaw), or put listings behind a paywall, or provide only skeletal product information.
How we Plan to Address this Need
Our goal with the LawNext Legal Technology Directory is to provide comprehensive, intuitively categorized listings and descriptions of legal tech products and services, enhanced with verified user reviews, third-party news coverage, and editorial curation and commentary – all from the same team that has published this blog, LawSites, for nearly two decades.
We will cover all segments and sizes of the market – from large to small firms, to corporate, government and legal services, to consumers, and we will be the only legal tech directory to incorporate both verified user reviews and editorial coverage of products and companies, with coverage drawn from both this blog and a range of third-party blogs and publications.
The directory will include:
- Substantive information on legal tech products, including descriptions, feature listings, screenshots, videos, whitepapers, and other resources.
- Trusted, verified reviews from peers who have actually used the product.
- Objective reviews, reporting and analysis from third-party sources including media and blogs.
- Editorial curation and commentary by the same editorial team that publishes LawSites.
- Intuitive categorization, based not just on types of products, but on how those products would fit into different areas of legal practice.
Powered by Justia
The directory is the product of LawNext Media Inc., a company cofounded by me and Ben Ambrogi, a media and marketing professional and founder of the podcast production company Populus Radio.
We are honored to have been able to develop this directory in partnership with Justia, a company whose purpose is to advance the availability of legal resources for the benefit of society.
Justia developed and maintains Justia.com, one of the highest trafficked legal websites in the world, which includes free case law and codes and various community resources.
It also developed and operates the Justia Lawyer Directory, one of the world’s largest directories of legal professionals.
Add Your Reviews and Listings
If you are a legal professional, do your peers a service. When buying products of any kind, consumers trust peer recommendations over any other source of information by a wide margin. Take a moment to review a product you use in your work. Your insights could help ensure someone else makes the right choice.
Don’t see the product you want to review? Let us know.
If you are a vendor, please add your products. There is no cost to list your products. You get to ensure that your listings are accurate and up to date, and you get to add your own screenshots, videos and other collateral.
Vendors also have the option of purchasing upgraded listings, which allow you to enhance your listings in several ways, or to purchase featured placements, to enhance the visibility of your products.
This is Day One
I can’t tell you how many founders over the years have shared with me their trepidation over pulling the trigger and finally launching their product to the public. We are no different.
We know we have more work to do to make this the most useful directory in the market. But we also know we cannot achieve that without your participation – both the buyers and sellers who make this market so vital.
So check us out. Kick the tires. Add your reviews or listings. Then email with your feedback, suggestions and critiques: bob@lawnextmedia.com or directory@lawnextmedia.com.