Report to My Readers

"Dear Reader:This letter continues a custom begun 30 years ago of reporting the progress of The Wall Street Journal to our readers. In the first issue of the Journal, ..."

So begins the January 2, 2007 annual report of the WSJ to its readers.

I intend to inaugurate nothing nearly so formal here on "Adam Smith, Esq.," but what this publication is all about is communicating with you, my dear readers, and so it seems only fitting that I periodically bring you up to date on how things are going from the perspective of your faithful publisher.

First, a few basic facts:

• I started "Adam Smith, Esq." at the end of 2003 and launched it publicly in February 2004.
  
• As of today, there are 752 individual entries, or articles, on the site. If you printed out "Adam Smith, Esq." in book format, it would come to about 1,500 pages.
  
• All of my archives are and will continue to be available so long as I'm in charge here.  Server space is cheap; readers' time is not.
  
• My policy on comments is simple:  I approve them verbatim or disapprove them in their entirety.  Although, come to think of it, I can't remember the last (or even the first) time I did the latter.  But I never have and never will "edit" comments.
  
• Speaking of comments, several of you have told me of difficulties in contributing comments. You are not wrong.  I'm somewhat dissatisfied with the technology underlying the configuration of my comments system, but I've been to the wall and back with tech support to no avail, and at some point I have more important things to run to ground.  For the nonce, I humbly apologize and recommend that if you have something you'd like to contribute to the conversation, email your thoughts to me directly and I'll see that they get posted. 
  
• On the other hand, a minor technical victory I implemented recently was to create a "printer-friendly" formatted version of each article, accessible through the cryptically named "Printer Friendly Version" link you'll now find at the foot of each piece.
  
• "Adam Smith, Esq." runs on the  Movable Type publishing platform, which is the most sophisticated online publishing system that mere mortals can afford, and which supports many "blogs."  Movable Type incorporates such indispensable functions in an online publication as:
  • Archives by Category (down a bit on the left column)
  • A built-in RSS feed (top-most left column)
  • A site-specific search function (top left column)
  • A so-called "permalink," or unique, unchanging hyperlink address to each and every article (at the bottom of each piece), and of course
  • The default chronological order ranking of items.
    
• That said, permit me as Founder and Publisher to urge you to think of "Adam Smith, Esq." not as a "blog," a word which to this day comes with unfortunate connotations,  and a word I have assiduously avoided for at least a couple of years.  It is, in conception and in fact, a "publication"—one which happens to be online.

But enough about facts and stats.

Here's the stuff that matters. "Adam Smith, Esq." exists and, as you'll see, thrives because:

• The subject—the economics, strategy, and leadership of sophisticated law firms at the start of the 21st Century—is intrinsically fascinating to me and, I gather, to many of you.
• I knew there had to be—and you have vindicated me in this conviction—a smart, informed, opinionated and inquisitive reader community that would appreciate and follow a site devoted to that topic.
• The challenges facing our firms have never been greater, as the pressures of globalization, consolidation, and the war for talent intensify in ways most of us could never have imagined when we began our careers. And
• I do my utmost to address these topics with the level of sophistication, rigor, and nuance that I believe you are entitled to.

As some of you know, "Adam Smith, Esq." has expanded into the offline world as well.  Most of you probably know about my "Law Firm Finances 101" offering, which has been quite well received.

I'm gratified to report that last month the Dean of Career Services at Harvard Law School approached me about offering it to their second and third-year students—and now to their faculty as well—and I'll be presenting it in Cambridge next September.  Although I'm a Stanford Law grad, I'll take Harvard as my first law school client any day of the week.

Also, I'm being invited to speak at an increasing number of domestic and international conferences, and law firm partners' retreats and other offsite events, which I find one of the most challenging things I can possibly do.   Some of these have preceded, and some have followed, my being engaged by the firm to talk through strategic and financial challenges they're facing.

Most of you are aware of my free monthly e-newsletter, which features at least one piece of content not available on the site (subscribe here), and I'm pleased to report that less than one year after launching it we have as of today 1,875 subscribers, from around the English-speaking world.

Finally, a report on visitors to "Adam Smith, Esq."

Suffice to say readership has been constantly growing:  Which the economist in me takes as the ultimate sign of marketplace validation.  Here are the numbers. 

Last month, April 2007, was an all-time high in terms of number of visitors.  (The metric I favor is "page views," which means one person looking at one page.)  Here's the pertinent graph, going back to September 2006, of page views per month:

This shows nearly 300,000 page-views on the site last month.

But wait, there's more:   Based on reader surveys, about one-third of you subscribe to "Adam Smith, Esq.," by RSS feed. Your subscriptions are not reflected in these statistics since, technically, you are not "viewing pages" on the site.  So if we add back in another, say, 30% on top of those numbers, it means nearly 400,000 page views last month.

This is a deeply gratifying number—and one which is both humbling and slightly shocking.

It does, however, speak to the power and the loyalty of you, dear reader.  As I say to anyone who tells me they enjoy "Adam Smith, Esq.:"  "Tell your friends!"

Evidently you've been doing just that.  Keep it up, and remember that the publisher is always in.