Editors' Blog

A lot of Wiki this way comes

Posted 8/01/2008 by Alex Novarese

If New Year is the time to get reflective, it’s also the time for Legal Week to think about our website, legalweek.com, which was comprehensively overhauled this time last year. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that it was well received, doubling web traffic over the year and generating over 3,000 posts from readers along the way.

It’s also fair to say that the move to drastically remodel the site around interactivity and community proved successful. Certainly, as a business journalist who has spent most of his career talking to senior (sometimes self-involved) decision-makers, it’s been an eye-opener to read the comments posted by readers working at the coal-face.

But perhaps the most ambitious element of the site was to start a Wiki for law firms. While it has proved to be more work than expected, it has also been one of the most interesting sections of the new-look site, generating hundreds of comments along the way.

We also know that large firm profiles can generate thousands of views a month, so presumably someone out there finds them useful. Still, it’s the nature of the beast that it takes time to build it out as reader comments come in, journalists pull together content and firms send in material.

As such we’ve only recently gotten around to fully upgrading the entries for London’s big four: CC, A&O, Freshfields and Linklaters. The Linklaters entry is worth looking at again, even if just for a chance to see Guy Beringer’s video tribute to Tony Angel. And as you’d expect, the History section for Freshfields is, ahem, lengthy.

Please let us know if you have any ideas on how to expand the Wiki, which we view as a work in progress (though at 50,000-odd words and climbing, progress takes time). And apologies to the firms that have submitted background information that we haven’t edited in yet – we’ll get there.

alex.novarese@legalweek.com