Happy Birthday To Us

We here at Abnormal Use celebrate our first birthday today. That’s right: Our very first post – our mission statement – was published one year ago today. We’ve greatly enjoyed bringing you products liability litigation commentary over the past year, and we were humbled when we were named to the ABA Journal‘s Blawg 100 list late last year. (Another unexpected joy was learning yesterday that we had been named by the ABA Journal as the most popular torts blog).

What else to say on the occasion of the first anniversary of the birth of one’s law blog? We could look forward to the coming year and preview what we have in store for our readers. But that would be telling. We could wax philosophical as some blogs do on such occasions, and there is some purpose to such self reflection. So we’ll do just that, if only for posterity.

It all began in the final months of 2009. Those were the halcyon days during which we planned and plotted this blogging enterprise. Knowing that a successful blog must offer fresh commentary weekly, preferably daily, we wanted to ensure that we could do so. Thus, we developed an infrastructure that included two principal authors and five contributors, each with his or her own assigned beat to cover. It has proven to be a successful formula, and we are pleased with the results. We think the ability to post daily is one of the keys to our success.

We also knew that in order to keep our commentary lively and interesting, we’d need to inject a bit of personality into our posts. This, of course, is something we learned from our good friends over at the Drug and Device Law blog who aren’t shy about expressing their opinions. (Neither, in fact, are our pals Walter Olson and Ted Frank at the Overlawyered and Point of Law blogs).

One thing that we have not yet accomplished is to establish this site as a place for back and forth discussion between we, the authors and contributors, and you, our readers. We know from our Sitemeter statistics that we have a certain number of visitors each day, including some who we suspect are regular repeat visitors. (If you’re a regular, say hello!) In the coming months, we’d like to encourage a dialogue between ourselves and our readers on our topics of interest.

In the end, though, we look back and must confess that we’ve quite enjoyed this blogging thing. We look forward to another year of the same, and we thank you again for your support.