Many will know the name of Phil Grossman, from Boston, as a frequent commenter here, but his assistance to the site went much beyond that. No reader had a sharper eye for good stories, and I think more posts over the years were based on his links than on anyone else’s. Often his news tips would arrive accompanied by his consistently thoughtful analysis of what the stories meant on a deeper level and how the system might be reformed to do better next time. Time after time, his emails would brighten my writing day with their wit, intelligence, and sympathetic wisdom.
Now Eric Grossman writes to report his father’s death. I can well imagine the gap that must be left in his family with his passing, and extend my heartfelt personal sympathies to those he leaves behind.
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about the site
Due to a plugin upgrade, many users found our front page stuck on its July 30 version over the past couple of days. I think I’ve resolved it now; if you’ve still got a July 30 version of the front page and forced-refresh won’t help (Windows: ctrl+F5, Mac/Apple: Apple+R or command + R), let me know.
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about the site
Ten years ago — July 1, 1999 — I put up the first post in this space. You can read the first fifteen days’ worth of posts here.
Thanks for the congratulations and kind words that have been coming in:
- Patrick, Popehat: “Here’s to ten more years for Overlawyered. And may your name never be featured there.”
- Scott Greenfield, Simple Justice: “That’s 10 years of holding lawyers’ feet to the fire. Thank you!” [Twitter]
- Social-media champion Kevin O’Keefe, of the LexBlog empire: “Don’t always agree, but inspired me to blog.” [Twitter]
- Eric Turkewitz of New York Personal Injury Law Blog has an exceedingly generous post that notes my interest in linking to views from across the conventional divide. I hope I succeed in living up to his high praise.
- Carter Wood, NAM “ShopFloor”: “the Web’s single most effective puncher-of-holes in the excesses of the litigation industry”.
- Ron Miller, Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog: “You always feel like you are getting his thoughtful views as opposed to a knee jerk ‘party platform’ opinion.”
- David Bernstein, Volokh Conspiracy: “I think it was the first legal blog, and I know it’s still one of the best.”
- Cathy Gellis (Statements of Interest): “Blog so old he used to post with typewriter and carbon paper
”
- Robert Ambrogi, Law.com “Legal Blog Watch”: “That is a full decade of chronicling the abuses and excesses of the litigation system, of commentary that is consistently cutting and wry. I may not always agree with Walter Olson, but I sure as heck always read him.”
- Mickey Kaus, Slate “Kausfiles”: “The high process costs of litigation are what lawyers — for obvious reasons — habitually leave out of their let’s-have-notice-and-a-hearing-for-everything reasoning. One thing Olson does is to put them back in.”
- And more: Doctor Wes of the eponymous blog [Twitter], Steven Cohen’s LibraryStuff, Spada (U.K.) Swordplay, Wise Law Blog (Toronto), Milwaukee Federalists, Ron Coleman/Likelihood of Confusion, and Christopher Robinette at TortsProf.
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accolades
LawLine.com (”Celebrating 10 Years of Online CLE”) has begun a new weekly series that “will recognize some of the most notable legal blogs on the web”, and is kind enough to begin it with this one. Christie LaBarca says she enjoys running across “unique” and even sometimes “outlandish” stories that other law blogs don’t pick up on. She quotes me on a couple of theories that might explain the blog’s longevity (as I’ve mentioned, it’s coming up on its tenth anniversary in just a month and a half).
Speaking of kind things people say about us, I don’t think there’s any way I’m going to live up to the headline on Brandon Martin’s generous column at Daily Uprising.
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about the site,
accolades,
interviewed
If I took advertising here at Overlawyered, I might worry more about how and whether to pursue higher traffic. In the mean time, columnist Alex Beam got me to come clean about what kind of subject matter seems to work best in getting droves of new visitors to notice the site. (It’s not class-action reform). [Boston Globe] (& welcome Virginia Postrel, Bob Trebilcock/Modern Materials Handling readers).
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about the site
I upgraded last night to the latest version of WordPress, and whether relatedly or not, a couple of strange things went wrong this morning with recent entries: in particular, the short post from over the weekend on the Phoenix police blogger disappeared and was replaced by a draft post on a different subject. I’m working to fix and restore things. If you notice other aspects of the site that aren’t behaving as they should, drop me a line. P.S. Post restored with its comments; most broken links should be back working.
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about the site,
WordPress
For a while after switching the site to the Thesis theme for WordPress I put up with Thesis’s default 404 Page Not Found message, but now (thanks to Sugar Rae for the tutorial) I’ve succeeded in customizing it back to the favorite old version, which periodically wins a place on “best 404s of the web” lists.
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After tinkering with some of the file and cache issues I should have handled more carefully during the WordPress upgrade, I may have succeeded in solving the problem reported by many users of a front page frozen at Jan. 3. It may be necessary to do a forced-refresh (SHIFT click reload page) to produce the current page. If this still doesn’t work for you, please let me know in comments or email.
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I expect to be doing a little upgrading to the site in coming days, so don’t be surprised if it becomes unavailable for short periods (or even longer periods, if something goes wrong).
Update late Saturday evening: looks like the upgrade to WordPress 2.7 has been successful, with only about half an hour of downtime. If you notice problems in the way the site runs, by all means let me know.
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Overlawyered is lucky to have a valued set of commenters from whom I often learn things, and it’s been quite a while since our comments section has suffered from any outbreak of bad commenter behavior, flame wars, or that sort of thing. I was reminded of our good fortune since several bloggers have recently added guidelines on comments moderation or otherwise outlined their views. At Volokh Conspiracy, known for its busy and high-quality comments section, Orin Kerr has posted a “Clarified Comments Policy” which with perhaps a slight change here or there could also serve as a comments policy for this site. Meanwhile, the site I helped launch a couple of weeks ago, Secular Right, from almost its first day attracted a high comments volume (more than 2,000 comments in the first two weeks) including more than a few that were contentious or uncivil — not an unexpected consequence when there are sharp disagreements on the topic of religion. After one blowup I noted the following:
[click to continue…]
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about the site,
open threads and commenter posts
In an article for Law.com on legal blogging (”How to Build a Better Law Blog”, Dec. 8) C.C. Holland is kind enough to quote me and discuss this site:
…Walter Olson imagined that his Overlawyered blog would pull an audience of his friends and acquaintances and a cadre of legal policy wonks.
“But you don’t know who your audience really is until you start writing and find out,” he notes. “My readership has a large following among lawyers, but I’ve been surprised to find that a lot of doctors are reading it, as are a lot of people from other countries.” …
Olson, who has been writing Overlawyered since July 1, 1999, knows a thing or two about longevity. His blog is widely considered to be the oldest legal blog and is also one of the most popular, regularly surpassing 9,000 unique daily visitors.
“People who force themselves to blog, it’s a sad spectacle,” he says. “You can tell reading it that it’s painful to them.” The key is to find a topic that will sustain you. “You have to think, ‘Boy, there’s so much to write about I can’t imagine getting tired of it anytime soon,’” he says.
And I still can’t.
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accolades,
Walter Olson
…are not meant to further anyone’s marketing campaign, okay? So don’t be surprised if your promotional URL gets scissored off your comment, or the comment itself gets deleted if its primary purpose appears to be promotional.
And if, worse yet, you’re actually paying a service to go around planting comments of this sort, consider whether there might be better uses of your money.
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about the site
Intermittent outages have knocked Overlawyered offline for most of the past 24 hours, but it looks as if we’re back now. The problems began with spammer attacks on scripts from our old Movable Type days (moral: if you’re not using old scripts, remove them) and continued with out-of-memory problems.
Some elements of the site may still be missing or not up to date; I’ll be troubleshooting those as the day continues.
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Comments policies
by Walter Olson on December 15, 2008
Overlawyered is lucky to have a valued set of commenters from whom I often learn things, and it’s been quite a while since our comments section has suffered from any outbreak of bad commenter behavior, flame wars, or that sort of thing. I was reminded of our good fortune since several bloggers have recently added guidelines on comments moderation or otherwise outlined their views. At Volokh Conspiracy, known for its busy and high-quality comments section, Orin Kerr has posted a “Clarified Comments Policy” which with perhaps a slight change here or there could also serve as a comments policy for this site. Meanwhile, the site I helped launch a couple of weeks ago, Secular Right, from almost its first day attracted a high comments volume (more than 2,000 comments in the first two weeks) including more than a few that were contentious or uncivil — not an unexpected consequence when there are sharp disagreements on the topic of religion. After one blowup I noted the following:
[click to continue…]
Tagged as: about the site, open threads and commenter posts
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