This October 1999 edition of our Minnesota Law Firm Web Site Rankings Survey is our third formal effort to find out which Minnesota law firm web sites and pages people visit most.

Since we initiated our survey in January, 1999, our rankings have been the only tool for members of the Web community interested in learning where others increasingly are heading when they want information from and about Minnesota law firms.

Our rankings have also been only tool available to Minnesota law firm web publishers who want to find out how they are faring traffic-wise in comparision to their peers. The rankings are, we freely acknowledge, incomplete, because only a few firms take the time to participate. We have received very positive comments from participants each time we have conducted the survey.

Our Methodology. We invited firms headquartered in Minnesota as well as firms headquartered in other states that maintain offices in Minnesota to participate. (These are the firms we list in the Directory of Minnesota Law Firms on the Web.)

We asked firms to voluntarily report overall site page views for October. We also asked how many page views their home page URL received. And we also asked firms to report page view numbers for up to three additional frequently visited interior pages. Firms that publish more than one web site were asked to report separately for each site.

Rankings are based on reported page views. Rankings reflect worldwide traffic. Some participating firms have offices in other states and countries. Some activity may be generated by firms' personnel using their own sites. Visits by robots that index the Web also generate page views. Some sites may receive more such visits than others. No attempts have been made to adjust for these factors.

The survey is dependent on accurate self-reporting by firms of information compiled from their web server logs.

In our first two surveys, we reported ranked results from "large firms" (firms with more than 20 attorneys) and "small firms" (firms with fewer than 20 attorneys and solo practitioners) separately.

Our goal was to create a separate opportunity for recognition for small firm web publishers. Large firm web traffic should not overshadow the substantial accomplishments of small firm web publishers (who in many instances have higher web traffic on a "per attorney" basis than do larger firms -- sometimes resoundingly so).

But it has occurred to us that this division in some instances is unnecessary.

So this time, we offered any small firm reporting page views exceeding the lowest reported by a large firm in any category the opportunity to also be listed with large firms.

Our understanding with participating firms is that we will publish relative rankings but not actual figures from firms' web server traffic logs.

1	Faegre & Benson, L.L.P	Our Lawyers
2	Faegre & Benson, L.L.P	Recruiting
3	Beck & Tysver, P.L.L.P./Bitlaw	Copyright Law in the United States (BitLaw)
4	Faegre & Benson, L.L.P	Practice Groups
5	Beck & Tysver, P.L.L.P./Bitlaw	Web Site Legal Issues
6	Beck & Tysver, P.L.L.P./Bitlaw	Patent Forms from the US Patent Office (BitLaw)
7	Leonard, Street and Deinard, P.A.	Leonard, Street and Deinard Alphabetical Attorney Listing
8	Leonard, Street & Deinard, P.A.: Year2000Team.com	Year 2000 Litigation - Leonard, Street and Deinard Year 2000 Team
9	Kinney & Lange, P.A.	Kinney & Lange Intellectual Property Law
10	Leonard, Street and Deinard, P.A.	Join LS&D
11	Leonard, Street and Deinard, P.A.	Leonard, Street and Deinard: Practice Areas
12	Kinney & Lange, P.A.	Kinney & Lange Law School Recruiting
13	Kinney & Lange, P.A.	Kinney & Lange - Meet Us
14	Leonard, Street & Deinard, P.A.: Year2000Team.com	Year 2000 Team of Leonard, Street and Deinard
15	Leonard, Street & Deinard, P.A.: Year2000Team.com	Bookmarks for the Year 2000 - Brought to you by the Year 2000 Team of Leonard, Street and Deinard

Should you wish to compare October rankings to April and January rankings, April results are still available at mostvisited499.htm, and January results (for web pages but not web sites as a whole) are at mostvisited199.htm.

Our thanks to each firm that participated!

Stay tuned for our new, improved Minnesota Law Firm Web Site Rankings Report.

We will begin to share data gathered from our own site about which Minnesota law firm web sites you, our visitors, visit.

Increasingly, services such as Alexa and some search engines crunch their own data for the purpose of providing information about where others on the Web are going in search of information.

Our newest report will not be capable of comprehensively measuring traffic at any site but it will report what our visitors collectively do.

Since we already forward visitors to Minnesota law firm sites thousands of times per month, we hope it will prove useful to you. We will list all firms ranked in order of the number of times our visitors "click through" to Minnesota law firm web sites.