The legal profession’s printing press turned eighteen years old on Thursday. More aptly said, WordPress is eighteen.

Eighteen years ago, personal publishing to the Web was in its infancy. Google’s Blogger, Six Apart’s Movable Type, Live Journal, and other blogging software powered around around one million blogs.

Today, WordPress, co-founded by then college student at the University of Houston, Matt Mullenweg, and Mike Little, is powering over 40% of all sites on the web, 64% of websites with content management systems and 15% of the world’s top websites, including Bloomberg, Disney and NBC.

WordPress’ impact on the legal profession is even greater. A personal printing press enables lawyers to advance the law and make the law more accessible like never before. When aggregated, we’ll have an open body of law surpassing the limited libraries of traditional legal publishers.

Movable Type powered LexBlog in the beginning. Powering the publishing of solo practitioners to the largest law firms in the world, I wasn’t going to run my platform on open-source software developed by someone in college.

I also couldn’t figure out how to use the spartan light green publishing interface of. WordPress back then.

I learned better. We have used WordPress for sometime and we and our platform users would not be where we are without WordPress.

Most importantly, without WordPress – and the digital printing press it provides our profession – the law would not be where it is today.