Advocate’s new website offers a great way to find prior articles – and to market your practice

The entire text of Advocate articles is now available free to everyone online

2018 November

Advocatemagazine.com is now live and ready for prime time. For the first time, both our writers and readers have a fully searchable and indexed database of Advocate’s instructional articles. It goes back five years, which we believe is about right for researching current topics in trial law.

As a reader, you can go to the website and do a Google-like search on a word, words, phrase or proper name that appeared in our articles. You can also use our indexed search to find all articles on a legal topic without limiting your search to certain words or phrases. For example, you might search the index for “products liability” instead of doing a word search for “state of the art defense”; this avoids limiting your search to just that phrase. Search the index for “premises liability” rather than on the words “trip and fall” to be certain of including articles that refer to a plaintiff who “slipped and fell.” You get the idea. Look for the “Advanced Search” tab on the top of the home page – it leads to all search options.

Market your practice

As a contributing author, the new website makes your article available to everyone who searches on Google. That’s a big deal and will become an even bigger deal as Google begins to rank our site higher in its search results.  Many of our authors write for Advocate to establish themselves as authorities on a subject and generate referral cases.  With the new website, those articles will be available not only to the 10,000 Southern California trial attorneys that subscribe to Advocate, but to potential clients who are searching on Google to find an attorney with demonstrable expertise in their type of case, whether it’s being hit by a truck, harassed at work or falling on a public sidewalk.  Finding your article in a peer-reviewed publication helps to validate in a client’s mind that you are the expert. 

Writers – check your bios!

As an author for Advocate, your bio and picture appear next to your articles on the website. It behooves you to keep that bio up-to-date – unless you are looking for potential clients to contact the firm you left two years ago. To make changes, email a new bio and/or photo to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. We are happy to create a hyperlink from your firm name to your firm’s website. Just provide the text for the hyperlink and we’ll do the rest. If there are other hyperlinks that you would like to see in your article, you can identify those to us as well.

Complete magazines and article reprints

In addition to the individual articles, a digital version of each Advocate issue will be found on the website. You can flip through pages just like it is paper and ink. The magazine covers from the past five years are there, and each cover links to that issue’s table of contents. Advertising has hyperlinks to advertisers’ websites, and the index to advertisers will be found in each edition. If you want to make reprints of an article for a seminar, to post on your Website or hand out to clients, you will find a PDF of each article available for download on the website.  Consider referencing the article on your Website and linking to the full article on the Advocate Website. Please note that reprinting in other publications still requires our written permission.

Writers – search before you write

Once you decide to contribute an article, let’s say on medical malpractice, please search for that topic and review what’s been written in recent years. If you are writing at the behest of a colleague who is serving as our associate editor for one issue, check with the editor to avoid redundant articles in that issue. Come up with a fresh approach and you’re likely to get more trial lawyers reaching out to say they read and enjoyed your article – isn’t that why you wrote it?

Northern Cal and jury verdicts

Our Northern California website, www.plaintiffmagazine.com, includes the last ten years of our Northern California magazine, Plaintiff. If you do a Google search and it returns articles from both magazines, you’ll probably find Plaintiff at or near the top of search results. That’s because it has been online much longer and has more sites linking to it. If you’re an Advocate author looking for maximum exposure, don’t worry, www.advocatemagzine will move higher in the coming months. If you’re looking for verdict results, expert witnesses and all the other great data that comes out of trials, check out our verdict reporting site, www.juryverdictalert.com.

Suggestions welcome

We’d love to hear your suggestions on how to improve www.advocatemagazine.com. Please send your comments to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..