ECTF

From: Barbara Beauchamp
Please note this is a test and the real poll will be available shortly. Thanks! BB

Hello all. If I understand our meeting today, it was suggested that we do a brief post introducing ourselves, and for those of us who have them, identifying our blogs.

I'm Warren Redlich. Our office handles a fairly high volume of speeding tickets in upstate New York, along with some DWI and other criminal cases and a few plaintiff's personal injury claims as well.

We have a fairly sophisticated presence on the internet. Our law firm website, redlichlaw.com, gets about 1500 visitors a week. Much of the traffic results from people searching Google for something to do with speeding tickets or other traffic tickets, but other topics as well. The site ranks #1 on Google for the term "unlawful possession of marijuana" for example, as well as for many terms that include the word Albany (Albany lawyer, albany speeding ticket, albany dwi, albany personal injury, etc.).

At a certain point I realized many people were coming to the site having searched for something to do with local courts. I would often get calls asking me for directions or the court phone number. So I am creating a directory of traffic and criminal courts (town-court.com). We have almost completed New York State, and have started on New Jersey. We will also be starting Massachusetts soon. The site gets nearly 5000 visitors a week and that has grown quickly. January will have about 18,000 visits. There were about 9000 in November, 4000 in August, and less than 1000 in May. Visitors are usually looking for the court phone number or directions, and the site provides the number, a Google Map link, and other information. Many attorneys have told me they found it useful. If you search for a local court's name on Google, our site will often rank first, such as for my hometown's Guilderland Town Court. Also, if you search Google for "town court", the site ranks #1 and #2.

As for blogs, I have a few. My main blog is called the Albany Lawyer Blog. This is a casual blog, a bit like a diary, with various thoughts about the life of a lawyer in Albany. There are a number of posts about traffic and criminal practice, along with others about dealing with debt collectors, yellow pages, and so on. This gets about 300 visitors a week.

My next most viewed blog is my Stop Wasting Money blog, a holdover from my campaigns for Congress (yes, I lost, badly). It consists of older posts from the 2006 campaign, and is generally about politics and policy. This gets less than 200 visitors a week, but has big spikes if I write about something that draws attention. On 1/17, I got a spike of 115 visits because a post about tort reform was mentioned on overlawyered.com, a prominent website.

Other blogs include one for restaurant reviews and another on personal injury law. I have neglected both recently because I'm too busy with other things, especially with developing the town-court.com site, and then there's that darn family. And the law firm too.

Another site I've neglected is about Daniel Cady, a history site. Better known today as the father of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Cady was one of the finest attorneys and judges in the first half of the 19th century. He was the first Supreme Court Justice in Fulton County. I encountered him while working for the sixth JSC from Fulton County (Hon. Robert P. Best), who was keenly interested in history. In researching Cady, I found some 200 letters he'd written in a library at Syracuse University. I paid someone to transcribe all of them, and about 30 are now up on a "blog" on that site: Daniel Cady letter. If I ever find time, I will add the other letters and also post all of his published decisions in a separate blog. My brother gets the credit for thinking of putting the letters up in the form of a blog.

Well, that was longer than I expected. Please accept my apologies for the length of this introduction.

Warren Redlich

Greetings to all members to our new Blog. As a reminder we will be having our Quarterly Meeting via Teleconference this Tuesday, January 30th from 2 PM. to 4 PM. The dial-in number is 1-866-409-4300; conference code: 5184875644#. I am looking forward to speaking with you all and discussing our new Blog and other topics of interest.