The Expert Institute's Best Legal Blog Contest

After two months and more than 35,000 votes The Expert Institute’s first-ever Best Legal Blog Contest has finally come to an end. We were amazed at the response the contest received from the 250 blogs and bloggers who took part – all told, the contest pages received more than 18 thousand social shares across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google Plus.

Throughout the competition, the most active categories were Criminal, Niche & Specialty, Labor and Employment, and Technology. Unsurprisingly, the blogs that received the most votes were the ones that were most active on social media. We saw a variety of strategies from the contest’s participants: some ran contests of their own to get their readers to vote, some pursued dedicated outreach on social media, while others found clever and creative ways to collaborate with other members of the legal blogging community to get the vote out.

From all of the staff at The Expert Institute we’d like to thank all of the bloggers who participated in the contest. Your support and enthusiasm has helped make the competition something much bigger than we ever expected.

And the Winners Are

1st Place – The Law Office of James Novak

2nd Place – Canna Law Blog

3rd Place – Securities Lawyer 101

Some of the more interesting figures we were able to extract from the competition were:

The category with the most votes was, by far, Criminal. We saw more than 21,500 votes in that category alone – 61% of the votes in the contest overall. The category with the second most votes at 5,187 was Niche and Specialty, which also saw the greatest diversity of blog topics. The top three blogs include a blog on cruise ship law, legal cannabis, and securities law. The category with the fewest votes was Intellectual Property with only 304 votes overall. Still, the winning blogs in that category were active participants in the competition, and their victory is well deserved.

Social shares were strongly correlated with votes. Our overall winner – The Law Office of James Novak – undertook a serious campaign of social promotion, with his blog’s profile page receiving 2,700 Facebook shares, 276 mentions on LinkedIn, 7,801 Tweets, and an over 1,000 shares on Google Plus. This social activity quickly propelled his blog to the top of our vote counts.

Likewise, Top Class Actions, the winner of our Niche and Specialty category, was able to drum up over 1,700 Facebook shares to secure the top place in its category.

On a category level, social shares also had a strong correlation with vote count. The three categories that saw the most action on social media included Criminal, Medical Malpractice and Personal Injury, and Niche and Specialty. However, of the three it was Criminal that had the most social shares per blog in the category at 385, which accounts for the high vote count received by blogs in that category.

With the exception of Criminal, which far and away had the most social shares and votes, and Intellectual Property, which only received 304 votes and 66 social shares overall (just 4 per blog), both votes and social shares were generally consistent across the remaining categories.