Justia’s 2022 Year in Review

Take a peek behind the doors at Justia to see some of our highlights over the past year, including accomplishments, changes, and time spent with our team!

Approximate Read Time: 6 Minutes

As 2022 comes to a close, we are looking back at all that Justia has accomplished this year! Over the past 12 months, we have remained dedicated to making the law and legal resources free and accessible while also helping lawyers achieve their goals.

A dedicated team of hardworking Justians spent countless hours behind the scenes to make everything we have accomplished possible, from launching new Justia Marketing Solutions to adding new free legal information to the Justia Portal and more!

Check out this post to look at the highlights of Justia’s 2022.

Increased Access to the Law for All

The core of Justia’s mission is increasing free access to the law. We strongly believe that the law belongs to all of us, and people should have access to the laws that impact their lives. This year we continued to take that mission to new heights!

A Glance at the Numbers

Justia shared lots of free information online this year! The numbers help illustrate just how many times our team was able to connect people with the law.

The Details

The highlighted numbers only tell part of the story of how much free law Justia shared this year. Taking a deeper dive into the details paints a clearer picture of what we were able to accomplish.

50 State Surveys for Consumers

While states have enacted parallel laws in some areas, their laws diverge greatly in others. This can lead to different outcomes for people in similar situations. To provide more nuanced guidance, we compiled over 20 50-state surveys in legal areas that may be relevant to many
Americans.

As we expanded these surveys this year, our team took a closer look at employment and workplace rights, including:

• Employment discrimination
• Meal and rest breaks
• Family and medical leave
• Paid sick leave
• Vacation time
• Jury duty leave
• Voting leave
• Drug testing
• Social media privacy

After expanding our employment law center with these surveys, the Justia Team bolstered many other centers with similar nationwide surveys, including:

• A medical malpractice lawsuits survey in our medical malpractice center
• A car accident laws survey in our car accidents center
• A traffic ticket points survey in our traffic tickets center
• A bankruptcy exemptions survey in our bankruptcy center
• A foreclosure laws and procedures survey in our foreclosure center
• A workers’ compensation laws survey in our workers’ compensation center
• A property division survey in our divorce center
• A small estates laws and procedures survey in our probate center
• A wrongful death lawsuits survey in our personal injury center
• A voting laws and procedures survey in our civil rights and discrimination center
• A cannabis laws survey in our cannabis law center

Responding to Current Legal Issues

Landmark decisions on reproductive rights and firearms primarily dominated this year’s legal headlines.

The reversal of Roe v. Wade caused controversy and confusion across America. Some pre-existing state “trigger laws” took effect with the new Supreme Court decision or soon thereafter, while other states actively explored revising their laws. Courts in some states then blocked abortion restrictions, leading to uncertainty for abortion providers and consumers. In response, Justia compiled a 50-state abortion laws survey to help inform people about the current state of the law in each jurisdiction.

The Supreme Court also struck down a New York law restricting access to firearms. Around the same time, the federal government passed its first significant gun safety law in nearly three decades. This drew attention to gun laws nationwide, which take a diverse range of approaches. Our team compiled a 50-state gun laws survey, covering issues such as licenses and registration, background checks, open carry, concealed carry, and stand-your-ground laws, among others.

Our team also published 75+ legal news blog posts through Justia Legal News, covering breaking legal developments throughout the year.

Helping the Next Generation of Lawyers

As part of increasing access to the law, Justia strives to help the next generation of new lawyers as they take their first steps into the profession. These efforts were so successful this year that Justia was awarded a LegalTech Breakthrough Award as the Legal Education Innovation of the Year for its work with the Justia U.S. Law Schools Center.

New Case Law Outlines

With our goal of helping the next generation of lawyers in mind, Justia launched new case law outlines for over 30 law school topics this fall. The most popular outlines this semester have included criminal law, civil procedure, criminal procedure, sports law, and administrative law.

Choosing a Law School

Likewise, future lawyers took advantage of Justia’s resources while selecting an educational institution. The John F. Kennedy University School of Law, Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School, Massachusetts School of Law, University of Massachusetts Law School, and New England Law Boston were the most frequently viewed institutions in the Justia U.S. Law Schools Center this year.

Expanding Access to the Law Abroad

Our team also continued to help increase access to the law abroad with the addition of new information to the Justia Mexico Portal and our other Latin American law portals.

Connecting Lawyers and the Public

The Justia Lawyer Directory

Throughout the year, Justia helped people and lawyers better connect with one another. Over 400,000 individual lawyers across the nation were viewed in the Justia Lawyer Directory this year – that is a new lawyer profile view less than every two minutes throughout 2022!

Similarly, potential clients initiated more than 1.3 million phone calls to lawyers from the Justia Lawyer Directory. That is lots of consumers reaching out to lawyers – more than two calls initiated for every minute this year – and that doesn’t count emails and contact forms sent via our directory!

Justia Ask A Lawyer

Consumers also frequently turned to Justia Ask A Lawyer for answers to their basic legal questions throughout the year. Well over 15,000 consumers got their questions answered by licensed U.S. attorneys through our platform!

Questions were most frequently received in 2022 from users in California, Florida, Texas, New York, Michigan, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Ohio, and New Jersey. These questions most frequently were about common issues faced in criminal law, family law, real estate law, child custody, and divorce.

Many users this year also frequently searched the existing questions and answers in our database rather than submitting new questions when needing information. Below are some of the most commonly searched keywords and phrases over the past year:

Many lawyers across the nation answered the call to participate in Justia Ask A Lawyer! These 10 lawyers, however, were some of the most active attorneys on the platform this year: Timothy Denison, Tim Akpinar, Anthony M. Avery, Terrence H. Thorgaard, Dale S. Gribow, Penny Wymyczak-White, Ellen Cronin Badeaux, Mark Oakley, Neil Pedersen, and James R. Dickinson.

Helping Lawyers Grow Their Practices

Throughout the year, we continued to offer our products designed to help lawyers reach their full potential. During 2022, we continued expanding the information available through the Justia Onward Legal Marketing & Technology Blog with over 125 new articles published.

Justia Marketing Solutions

This year, we launched our new website platform through Justia Elevate. With this next generation of Justia websites, lawyers can leverage professional, high-quality law firm websites at affordable rates – all built on our optimized WordPress-based platform. Simply put, our team has integrated our years of legal marketing expertise and SEO knowledge into a new website platform built specifically for lawyers and law firms!

We also continued to offer our other high-quality legal marketing solutions. Paid search engine marketing through Justia Amplify became more accessible to lawyers across varying budgets with the introduction of our Justia Amplify Starter and Justia Amplify Advance plans. Lawyers were also able to continue to take advantage of Justia Premium Placements for up to 280x more visibility on average than a free profile in the Justia Lawyer Directory!

Our exclusive membership program for lawyers, Justia Connect, continued to grow, with approximately 5,000 new members joining our community of 75,000+ attorneys! In addition, we launched the new Justia Connect Pro Membership this year to offer Justia Connect members an upgraded membership experience with even more opportunities to share, learn, save, and grow.

These Pro-only membership benefits include a $200 Justia Credit applicable toward select marketing solutions, an enhanced Justia Profile in the Justia Lawyer Directory, the ability to feature reviews on a lawyer’s Justia profile, opportunities for expanded visibility across the Justia platform, and more!

Shortly after the Justia Connect Pro launch, our team also launched Justia Webinars, an exclusive membership benefit offering unique features for our Justia Connect Pros and lawyers with Justia Connect Basic Memberships. Following the launch of Justia Webinars, our team hosted multiple webinars covering search engine optimization and pay-per-click ads, with new topics and exciting presentations coming in 2023.

Attorney Outreach

As part of our commitment to helping as many lawyers as possible grow their practice, Justia also developed new outreach initiatives this year. Now, members of select bar associations can take advantage of special savings on Justia Marketing Solutions.

Additionally, members of our team traveled to Las Vegas for the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association convention, where they were able to meet lawyers from across the nation!

Building Team Justia

The Justia Team is the heart of our company. Each day numerous employees diligently work to ensure that everyone has greater access to the law and that our clients successfully leverage their marketing solutions to their full potential.

As our team continues to grow in various locations, we prioritized team-building through a number of virtual events. We participated in virtual escape rooms, had our very own magic show, and competed in our friendly annual competitions, such as the Ghoulie Awards and our ugly holiday sweater competition!

Team Justia also received “cookies” – the informal term our team uses for various company gifts – throughout the year! Justians were able to enjoy new backpacks and apparel, as well as chocolates for the holiday season.

Looking Ahead to 2023

Next year, Justia looks forward to continuing to bring free law to everyone. We are also eager to watch the lawyers in our community continue to achieve their goals while working with the best team! Stay tuned for the exciting updates coming in the new year, as we sincerely look forward to sharing them with all of you.

• Justia’s 2021 Year in Review
• Lawyers Are Invited to Our Free SEO Year in Review and 2023 Outlook
• Justia Wins 2022 LegalTech Breakthrough Award For “Legal Education Innovation of the Year”

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