What a year! While it has only been ten months since we published our first issue, the progress made in the electronic publication of legal information has been incredible. When we published in April of 1995, many wondered whether or not we would have much company in cyberspace. There were those who scoffed at our efforts, saying that using the Internet as a publication medium was little more than a gimmick.
Gimmick indeed. Since April, we have had over 33,000 hits - an average of more than one hundred hits per day. But hits don't tell the whole story. We have received quite a bit of attention since we published our first issue. Articles published in The Journal are already being used in classrooms around the world to teach the lawyers of tomorrow the law of cyberspace, and several Continuing Legal Education (CLE) seminars around the country have used our articles in their prepared materials to teach the lawyers of today about this developing field. Newsletters like Of Counsel and the Law Office Technology Report have given favorable reviews to our work. And if our content wasn't impressive enough, our presentation won raves as well: in August, Point Communications ranked us in the Top 5% of all web sites on the Internet, and included us as one of only eleven legal web sites in their book, The World Wide Web 1000.
Enough about us. In the ten months since our first issue, the medium has flourished. Online versions of law reviews - whether they were "E-journals" (online only) or simply the wired version of a print counterpart - sprouted up all over the Internet. One index on the net now has links to more than 100 law reviews and law journals on the net! In my letter in the first issue, I spoke of a resistance from some quarters to this new medium. Judging by the growing numbers of our neighbors in cyberspace, it will be increasingly hard for these "traditional" scholars to maintain that point of view.
In light of all of these developments, it is with a tremendous amount of pride that I present to you Volume II, Issue 1 of the Richmond Journal of Law & Technology. Readers from the first issue will notice a lot has changed. We have added a navigation bar for increased ease of use, seamless interfaces to search engines so that our readers can always see the latest information relating to the articles they are reading, more links from within the articles to primary material on the web... the list goes on. We have gone to great lengths to ensure that The Journal is as useful as possible. We appreciate that you have taken the time out to browse our pages, and encourage you to drop us a line and let us know what you think by sending e-mail to jolt@richmond.edu. On behalf of all 24 members of The Journal, I welcome you to the second issue of the Richmond Journal of Law & Technology. If you want to see something change, please tell us. If you have something to share, we encourage submissions and look forward to seeing the many directions in which The Journal can grow over the next few years.