Welcome to the Bradley B. Clark Law Group’s blog!
Back on October 10, 2003, I launched the Texas Law Blog on Google’s Blogger platform. In the beginning, the Texas Law Blog was modeled after Howard Bashman’s popular How Appealing blawg (for you younger readers, that’s what we called law blogs back then). The Texas Law Blog had a large following over its 9-year existence. I recall the thrill of watching its Google Analytics page in the early days and marveling at the number of people (and their country) on the site.
Over its 9-year life, the Texas Law Blog saw my law school graduation, my admission to the State Bar of Texas, my clerkship for the Honorable Cathy Cochran, the start of my tenure at Gray & Becker, P.C., and the birth of both of my sons. The first of what would eventually be 4,978 posts read as follows:
Welcome: Welcome to the new weblog devoted to issues in Texas law. The purpose of this site is to provide the Texas bench and bar with information on issues affecting the Texas legal community. I believe you will find this law blog timely, informative and interesting. Among several major Texas newspapers and legal websites, the Texas Law Blog monitors the Supreme Court, 5th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, and the various Courts of Appeals. Please pass this link on to your colleagues and help me make the Texas Law Blog a success.
Oh, I guess we also called them “weblogs” too back then (presumably to distinguish them from whatever non-web blogs there were at the time); but I digress….
I made many good friends through the Texas Law Blog and most of them have become lifetime friends and colleagues. The pace of life (raising two boys, practicing law, and training and racing in triathlons) caught up to me and I turned the lights off on the Texas Law Blog in early 2012.
Since then, I have enjoyed being a part of the online legal community on other, fresher and more narrowly focused blogs (e.g., Ken Adams’s very popular niche blog: Adams on Contract Drafting). I have learned so much about the practice of law from so many different people with just as many different perspectives. This became the fountainhead of my belief in opening up the law–not just from an access-to-justice point of view but from an improving-the-profession point of view.
Everyone wins with open law. Lawyers and the public we serve become more informed and better educated. The power of the crowd has benefited just about every industry including the legal industry. What started back in the early days of the Blogger platform as a way to share information led to today’s collaborative knowledge economy. Lawful.ly, a company I cofounded with fellow Texas attorney Chris Murphy, seeks to test many of the open-law theories championed by Richard Susskind in his famous book The End of Lawyers?
Where most companies seeking to disrupt the legal profession wish to do so at the expense of lawyers, Lawful.ly seeks to build an open body of the best legal scholarship collaborated on by lawyers and nonlawyers alike. If the world’s best and most widely used encyclopedia can be built by and on the wisdom of the crowd, so too can the world’s best (or in Lawful.ly’s case, America – we’re starting small!) legal book of knowledge. There are many promising companies in the game right now. It’s an exciting time standing in the intersection of law, technology, and the crowd.
So, while on the pages of this blog you might find an occasional soapbox discussion of #OpenLaw you are more likely to find discussions of the areas of law I focus on in my law practice: business transactions and business litigation. I love what I am blessed to wake up and do every day. And I am even more blessed to own my own law firm and practicing law each day with the help of my wife Lisa.
