We asked, you answered. Each Wednesday, the MSBA sends out its Legal News Digest (LND), which collects and highlights legal news from the past week, including Minnesota and national news as well as news about the legal profession. More  recently, we added select blog posts from local and national legal bloggers.

After launching the new LND format in May, we continue to tinker with minor changes but are also trying to gauge reader interest in various stories and topics to help us plan bigger changes. In the last few weeks we heard back from nearly 700 MSBA members about the strengths, weaknesses, and thoughts about our approach to the legal news. Here goes.

As we’ve seen with what people read in LND each week, the preferred focus is on Minnesota legal news and not so much on national legal news. As a number of people requested, we should “emphasize Minnesota legal news as much as possible and de-emphasize national stories, for which readers are highly likely to go to other sources.” We’re taking that to heart and looking at ways to address it, including the possibility of eliminating national news entirely as a focus. We’re also proud to report that, of those who responded, 93 percent agreed or strongly agreed that LND provided items of interest each week and that most readers believe we present a balanced range of perspectives (though 1/3 of the respondents were neutral on this question). Full survey results are available here if you want to see what readers prefer or like (or not like) about LND.

Interestingly, about 85 percent of our respondents view LND each time or “most of the time” it is delivered. While that’s astounding for electronic delivery of any kind (most organizations are happy with a 25 percent e-mail open rate), it likely reflects that those who responded are those who, well, typically open the e-mail. Though we are pretty amused by the one respondent who told us candidly that he was “embarrassed to say I do not know what it is.”

Posted by Karol Engstrom Narum