Legal industry-focused blog to go dark: Prof plans new site focused on legal productivity
Bill Henderson. ABA file photo by Wayne Slezak.
The Legal Whiteboard, a blog with data-focused posts about U.S. law schools and the legal profession, is coming to an end April 30, editor Bill Henderson posted there Monday.
“I am shutting down The Legal Whiteboard so I can make a more ambitious investment in online publishing. For the next year or so, and perhaps longer if the experiment works, virtually all of my professional efforts outside of teaching will be focused on building an online publication for my core research on the legal industry,” wrote Henderson, a professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law.
Henderson’s new endeavor, Legal Evolution, will focus on “lagging legal productivity in a world of rapidly increasing complexity,” he wrote, noting his own interest in doing applied research—research that aims to solve real-life problems in a practical way.
“We lawyers and law professors lack the skills and expertise to solve the legal productivity problem by ourselves. Whatever form the solutions take, we can be 100 percent certain that the inputs will be multidisciplinary,” the post reads. “Lawyers and law professors who collaborate with professionals from other disciplines will move a lot faster than those trying to stay at the top of the food chain. The ultimate goal of Legal Evolution is to accelerate this transition by curating examples of what is working in the field, including contextual knowledge to help readers make better decisions within their own organizations.”
Jerome Organ, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas and frequent contributor to the Legal Whiteboard, told the ABA Journal that he plans to contribute posts to Tax Prof Blog, another blog known for law school news, which is edited by Paul Caron, incoming dean of Pepperdine Law School.
