Greetings from our first 2010 blog post.  It’s been a crazy, tumultuous, and rewarding year here at The Lawyer Market.  Now at year end, we’d like to take this time to reflect on 2009, and the great things we can expect from 2010.

We started off in the worst economic environment in over half a century.  Major financial institutions had just collapsed.  This negatively impacted the rest of the economy as the financial crisis moved from “Wall Street” to “Main Street” and nearly all major companies were affected.  The legal market did not escape this trend, as these articles from the New York Times show. Unemployed and Struggling Lawyers Seek Solace and Why Major Law Firms are Shrink

Yet, in times of turmoil, opportunities present themselves.  We here at The Lawyer Market saw this crisis as an opportunity to fundamentally change parts of the legal process.  By utilizing the power of the internet, we hoped to connect lawyers with potential clients quickly and cheaply, all the while disseminating more information to both parties.  Hence, we began to create the lawyer market in early 2009.  It’s amazing to see all the support we have received, and we have successfully recruited more than 30 lawyers in only a little over two months of operations.

We have had successes and admittedly failures that forced changes and improvements with operations, marketing, finance and all aspects of the business.  For those of you who are frequent users, you’ve probably seen our landing pages change half a dozen times, all based on feedback and an effort to continually improve the user experience.  To recap then, in less than a year we’ve designed and create the site, successfully recruited a user base, and improved on a great array of our operations.

Naturally, we’re not satisfied so what does 2010 hold?  We’ve got several things on the agenda.  On the marketing side, you’ll be seeing a lot more from us as we ramp up our marketing efforts.  You’ll definitely see more site changes as we have engaged several consultants to further improve on the user experience.  Finally, for those of you who signed up from outside of Illinois, expansion is definitely in the works.  So to all of you who have used our website and/or supported us, thanks for a great 2009 and look forward to an even better 2010.