What’s on the bench

A domain I’ve owned and never used: zackglaser.com. This series documents turning it into something, in public, starting from a blank DNS record.

The decision

Build a personal site that holds all of me in one place — the legal tech work, the running, the tinkering, the essays I keep threatening to write — instead of letting each live only where some platform decided it should.

How I took it apart

I’ve spent years helping lawyers pick tools and build systems at Lawyerist, and before that running my own firm and founding Tech4Lawyers. All that time my own web presence has been scattered: a bio on someone else’s site, a LinkedIn profile, a podcast feed I host but don’t own.

The forcing question was: what’s the job of the site? I landed on three, in order. First, speaking and consulting leads — a place that makes it easy to book me. Second, an audience of my own, built through regular publishing. Third, a playground, because if it isn’t fun to work on I’ll abandon it by October.

The tempting move was to treat my interests as separate audiences — subdomains, separate brands, the whole taxonomy. I decided the opposite: the mix is the brand. “Legal tech commentator” is a crowded field. “Guy who takes things apart — software, training plans, workbenches, ideas — and shows you the pieces” is not. Splitting that into silos would delete the differentiator.

What I got wrong (or don’t know yet)

Open question I haven’t resolved: how the personal brand sits alongside my role at Lawyerist/Affinity. The intent is complement, not compete — but I haven’t drawn that line precisely yet, and I should before the speaking page goes live.

Next up

The site architecture: one house, four rooms, and why I’m not using subdomains.

Costs so far: ~$12/yr (the domain, finally earning its keep) / 2 hours