Findlaw Launches Family Law Center
Findlaw, the law and lawyer search engine, has launched a Family Law Center with information for families, as ‘family law impacts nearly every household in the United States.’ I really don’t visit Findlaw much, but do remember that their head of marketing is one heck of an active audience member at Search Engine Strategies conferences. Additionally, for those of you out there looking for models of launching a helpful resource in an effort to build more content to your site and also for linkbaiting (attracting links instead of asking for them), this is a fine example.
From the release : The FindLaw Family Law Center features information on a full range of topics, including prenuptial agreements, cohabitation and marriage, divorce, child custody and support, and domestic violence. The site also provides comprehensive and easy-to-understand articles, checklists, legal forms and links to a variety of state-specific resources and government agencies. These resources are presented in a user-friendly format that enables FindLaw users to quickly and easily find the information that meets their specific needs.
“Our mission is to give people the information they need to make informed decisions,” said Scott Kinney, vice president and general manager of Thomson FindLaw. “We built the Family Law Center to be a helpful, trustworthy resource for those seeking a legal perspective of their relationship and parenting issues. And, FindLaw can help them find a local attorney who specializes in representing individuals with Family Law needs.”
How does Family Law effect us? Here are some interesting stats from Findlaw : “About 2.2 million couples will get married this year and 1.1 million couples will get divorced (yikes!), according to data from the U.S. Center for Health Statistics. The center also says more than 1 million adults live with an unmarried partner, and there are more than 100,000 adoptions annually.”
I hope there is a focus on the judicial side of family law versus the administrative process of family law, especially within the State of Michigan. Michigan Family Court has so heavily relied on “friend of the courts” that they have skewed the process of determining the best interests of the children and instead maximize their own budgets, through high child support awards, delays in processing requests, and bad recommendations that ultimately only serve to increase the amount of Federal and State incentives within their own monetary flows. The focus needs to be on the actual judicial process and forms, showing people how to excercise their own rights instead of relying on biased administrative entities that have their own interests and their employers interests as primary. In Michigan the foc is an employee of the circuit court in which they work by statute, meaning that the foc has a duty to inform and duty of loyalty to the judges they work for.