If you’ve worked in legal media for any length of time, you may have come across LawFuel.
The New Zealand-based online legal news site was formed in 2000 at the dawn of the modern internet age and is one of the market’s longest-running legal news and job sites.
An early pioneer in this space, it has outlived numerous other legal directory and news sites, many of which have come and gone and reinvented themselves in that time.
When I worked in-house in law firm PR departments in the early 2000s, LawFuel was one of those places where you sent your press releases and firm news, before the likes of Lexology, JDSupra, LexBlog, Linked-In, Twitter, and all the other modern aggregators were around.
To be honest, I hadn’t followed LawFuel for some time – I knew it was still around, but hadn’t made contact for more than five years.
So recently I spoke to the site’s founder, John Bowie, to find out what the company was doing.
Prior to founding LawFuel, John, who is based in Wellington, published New Zealand Lawyer – later sold to Lexis Nexis.
At LawFuel, the main development in recent years has been the separation of the site into two parts – the “.co.nz” suffix, focused on the New Zealand law firm market, and a newer “.com” which is more international, and weighted towards the United States.
As you might expect, LawFuel has become more focused on search engines in recent years.
Lawyers and law firms can access a Google-friendly page of their own, and upload, delete and amend content.
John said that LawFuel encourages contributors to provide law news articles for exposure via a “straight-to-Google news service”.
In addition, LawFuel has editors who access law firm articles, news, and releases for placement on the site.
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