Corporate Governance

Barristers Best and The Race to the Bottom

By J. Robert Brown

Ranking law blogs is notoriously hard to do.  Do you rank by traffic, an approach used by Paul Caron when he does a quarterly list?  If you rank by traffic, do you go with individual IP addresses or page views?  Do you rely on the number of links to your blog, a method used for example by Google?  (Ranking of blogs, including the influence of blogs on US News rankings, is examined in greater detail in Of Empires, Independents, and Captives: Law Blogging, Law Scholarship, and Law School Rankings). 

And, of course, whatever the metric, how does one assess influence?  Particularly in the realm of modestly trafficked blogs (as most law blogs can be characterized), the goal is influence quality rather than quantity (although some law bloggers are paid and this does often depend upon traffic). 

So, we were very pleased, here at The Race to the Bottom, to see that we had achieved a mark of influence.  Law Week Colorado, a legal newspaper, put out an issue titled "The Best of the Best," a paean to "the very best things about living and working in the legal world of Colorado."  The issue included a number of categories and ranked the best based on the consensus of the 400 or so readers who submitted ballots, labeled the People's Court, and the staff of Law Week, labeled Barrister's Best.  

Included among the many categories was the best law blog (see page 16).  The People's Court weighed in on Above the Law, a blog that unabashadly describes itself as a "legal tabloid"  (http://www.abovethelaw.com/).  

The Barrister's Best?  Our very own Race to the Bottom.  As the paper explained:

• Race to the Bottom is a blog written by University of Denver Sturm College of Law students and profs, and it gives you something more substantial to read after you've gotten your daily schadenfreude fix at Above the Law.  Though Race to the Bottom's main focus is corporate governance, few blogs or newspapers have explored the Nacchio and Churchill trials from as many angles.

We don't aspire for these sorts of things but when they happen, we appreciate them.  The students worked particularly hard covering the two trials mentioned above.  Its nice to know that some arbiters of quality and influence noticed.   The University of Denver has posted a short story on the accomplishment. 

Full post as published by The Race to the Bottom on September 04, 2009 (boomark / email).