Building a virtual community

Welcome to the virtual home of Legalese, student newspaper for the University of Houston Law Center. Our editor, Emily Gelman, will give you a more formal welcome later, when we launch the blog officially. For now, allow me to introduce myself. I'm Marshall Preddy, a 3L at UH Law School. I write about tech/web issues for Legalese. With blessings from Emily and our associate editor, James Caruthers, I've spearheaded this new project, the Legalese Blog.

It only took us about 10 minutes to the site up and running using Blogger.com, but the real effort is going to come later, as we begin supplementing our coverage in the print edition of Legalese. Because printing a single issue of the paper can get pretty expensive, Legalese only comes out 5 times per year. We have to be pretty smart about how we spend our modest organizational stipend from UH. But the blog, well, we can post here as much as we want and it's free. The hope is that we can bring you more content more often, and more quickly.

Another advantage of our new blog is that it's a two way street. Unlike our print version, you can respond to our posts with your own comments. We hope to start a conversation with our readers, and eventually build a community for our fellow law students that can survive from year to year, no matter who's in charge of the paper.

Soon, Emily, James, and all our staff writers will join me in updating the blog on a regular basis. We hope you check back with us often.

Finally, I'd like to thank Gina Alsdorf, a Washington State lawyer with her own blog. She previously had the legalese.blogspot.com address, and was kind enough to let us have it, no questions asked. That's an awfully good way to start.