State of the Site Report - End of First Month

We launched one month ago - at midnight on March 3, 2009. A lot of people have asked me how things are going. Basically I'm pretty pleased.

We launched from Key West. (Thank you, Dolly & Robert!!) It has been a wonderful respite from constant travel and it is appropriate since my introduction to the movement came at the International Alliance of Holistic Lawyers meeting in the Florida Keys in 1999.

It has been a busy time but easy to balance my life here in Key West. The photos give you some idea. (Michael Matthews is the photographer.) We're a few steps from the water and most of the days have been clear and warm. Nature calls me outside several times a day.

Some stats: CuttingEdgeLaw.com had about 3,000 unique visitors with an average of almost 2 visits each and more than 6 pages per visit. After a spike from the launch, our high days were the last days of the month with about 200 new visitors each day. In the world of websites, that's good. Steady increase in traffic, returning traffic that spends enough time to view several pages. Our YouTube channel recorded more than 8,500 views, more than half since launch. We have 170 videos.

We have going on 200 registered users and about 60 of them are premium members. We'll be taking the $49.99 special down soon so if you want to join and haven't, do so quickly. Our members are from seven countries: US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Panama, Philippines, and India. I'm particularly pleased that we have an international presence. Three of our bloggers are from outside the US.

Press: NC Lawyers Weekly interviewed me and is doing a series on holistic law (spurred by Jennifer Foster). The paper version was featured on the first page, I'm told, but I've read the web version at http://www.nclawyersweekly.com/feature.cfm . I've also been in communication with a few free lance writers and a major magazine which is doing an issue about law and may include some of our materials. Mediate.com ran a short blurb about our launch and more collaboration is in the works. Stay tuned!

Many of our Premium Members haven't entered their profile information yet. We called a few and they made a good case for being busy. If that's the case, take a few deep breaths and don't worry about it. Get to it when you can. However, if you need technical support, email me and I'll send instructions. If all else fails, we'll set up a phone call. If you need help resizing photos, send them to me by email and I'll take care of them for you.

Technical issues: A few people have had glitches. Firefox is the best browser for our site. We seem to have a problem with Internet Explorer outside the continental US. Several members made good suggestions about upgraded features and improved navigation. Demian and I will be meeting in April for a marathon work session to handle some of the issues and FIX them!

Content tweaks: When users upload content and put several key words, it is hard to sort it so we created an Editor's Corner where I will sort the articles. A similar system for videos is forthcoming.

News Feeds were pretty easy in the beginning. I have been experimenting with Google searches for over a year and have honed the search terms to find the best content. This month, I added several news searches having to do with problem-solving courts and have been overwhelmed with news articles about drug courts and mental health courts. With more than 3,500 problem-solving courts, you can imagine that they show up in media quite often. Now, I'm being more discerning about the news feeds I post about those topics. Every day there are inspiring stories about drug court graduations, reunions between mothers and children in dependency courts. I'll pick and choose the best of them and not include every one. That is true of all the feeds, by the way. Sometimes the words "restorative justice" appear in an article that is about something else. I sort them and only include the articles with some substance about the movement. Eventually the News Feeds will be sorted by categories like Jobs, Events, News, etc. but right now it all gets reported together.

While we were in South Florida, we interviewed several of the problem-solving judges in Miami plus Law Professor Bruce Winick and Scott Rogers of the Institute for Mindfulness Studies,
http://imslaw.com/Home.html

Problem-solving courts started in Florida so they are some of the top experts. (Thank you, Peggy Hora, for connecting us.) Every time we do an interview, we think it is the best one we've ever done and this batch is no different. These problem-solving judges are doing great work! I was really touched that, even after years on the bench, they all seemed passionate and inspired by their work. I've known Bruce for ten years and learned things about him in the interview that blew me away. Scott and I discovered we had both gone to University of Florida and were influenced by Marty Peters. All of the interviewees were gracious and generous with their time.

Also in the last few weeks, Jill Dahlquist, Donna Boris, and Cheryl Conner have been at work as space-holders for CuttingEdgeLaw.com. I'm grateful for their love and assistance.

We're leaving Key West in a few days so the editing of the South Florida videos won't be ready to go for a while. We're heading to North Carolina to work on business for a few days (I do still practice law) then to Nashville (Vanderbilt Law); Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio, Texas (including a restorative justice conference); then Montgomery, Alabama. Michael's daughter is going into the Peace Corps and leaving soon so we'll take a couple of weeks off then head to the IAHL conference in Chicago before we stop to catch our breaths again.

We hope to settle somewhere for a few weeks to edit videos before moving onto finish the tour. We still have many interviews in the Northeast, the center of the country and Southern California. We started with a list of 100 leaders to interview and we've doubled our list of "musts" on the road without finishing the first list. This movement is much larger than I thought and I've always thought I was over-estimating.

We have a bunch of features and upgrades in the hopper. Mediate.com and IAHL are our partners and we're talking with several other organizations about partnerships. We are working on new benefits for Premium Members. We are developing a Client section to draw client traffic to the site.

Thank you for being part of our first month and join us for the adventure. If you haven't signed up as a Premium Member yet, please do so and support our work.