There are now six blogs on family law in the UK, one from a barrister and five from individual solicitors. All the bloggers obviously love their blogs and have become fascinated by the whole process. Here are brief summaries of the blogs, in no particular order.
Divorce Solicitor Blog is a very lively blog from Lynne Bastow, of Southampton firm Bastows Divorce Solicitors. She poses questions like “How can you tell if your wife is being unfaithful?” There are lots of lively stories and good photos to go with the stories.
Bloody Relations, comes from barrister Jacqui Gilliatt whose tagline for the blog is “Where there’s a relative there’s a bloody good argument to be had.” The blog is associated with material on Jacqui’s chambers website, 4 Brick Court, where there are a large number of articles and updates on family law.
Family Law Matters is a blog from Jo Spain of Kent firm Spain Williams LLP with articles, information and news on many areas of Family Law. The blog is unusual in that the whole firm’s website is based on blogging software.
Family Lore – random thoughts of a family lawyer – is a blog from John Bolch of Kent firm Winch & Winch. This was the first blog on family law. It provides a useful set of updates for family lawyers.
Judith’s Divorce Blog comes from Judith Middleton of Darlington firm Latimer Hinks and “consists of reflections and emotions associated with divorce, separation and associated topics”, with the particular point of view that Judith is associated with Resolution.
Benussi Blog from Diane Benussi of Birmingham firm Benussi & Co describes itself as “discreet divorce with care and compassion” and concentrates on how to live with divorce, particularly with children who need to be protected from the emotional fallout.
I asked each of these family law bloggers if they would write a short piece for the Newsletter. Here are their contributions.
DivorceSolicitor
from Lynne Bastow
My blog at divorcesolicitor.blogspot.com was set up to complement updates, general procedural advice and tongue in cheek opinions. My sense of humour has fallen foul of Fathers 4 Justice who now target me as a man hater! However, the good news is that this has increased interest in my blog.
The best thing I did was set up an RSS feed as I get new subscribers every day. My website produces more business than my blog but I rarely check the traffic on it whereas I check what is happening on my blog every day. It is enormous fun creating it and the Blogger software is free and user friendly.
Most people access my blog via Google and the most popular searches are “what makes a man attractive?” (the answer is not lots of money!) and “at what age can children decide not to see their parent?” (unfortunately it seems to be as young as 10).
My blog is used by Hampshire e commerce as an example of how a small business can establish a blog as a route to market. I think that my blog will produce more business as time goes on – divorce is a common problem and the more people who read it, the more my name will stick.
I have deliberately chosen to include personal information about me in my blog. When clients attend their initial appointment it can be nerve wracking revealing the most intimate, personal details of their lives to a stranger. If I have referred them to my blog, they feel that they know me, and they often ask how I fared in my own divorces (very well).
A lot of comments I get are not publishable: “dotty divorce lawyer post a picture of yourself in a cossie” springs to mind. People can send whatever comments they chose but I think that I have the right to decide whether to publish them or not. There is never a dull moment when you choose to write a blog provided you make it a touch controversial. I think I might have blown my chances of becoming a judge though!
Writing a blog is like cooking – it only works if it is a pleasure not a chore. Only people who love cooking will know exactly what I mean.
Bloody Relations
from Jacqui Gilliatt
From my original website on family law, I used to get countless emails from members of the public asking questions about divorce and related matters. I wanted to find a way of answering them and taking some of the mystery out of the system.
I now have two web projects on the go as well as the chambers’ website (www.4bc.co.uk). One is a wiki (familylawfaqs.pbwiki.com), which at the moment is mainly about care cases, and the other is my blog Bloody Relations.
For software, Blogger offers the right balance of ease of use and flexibility as well as being completely free. I am not a programmer and don’t know much about html. Blogger has good basic templates and there are lots of user-written templates if you don’t like the standard ones. There is a good support forum and also many blogs about how to use the software.
I love the fact that everything about blogging is so instant. With my first website I had to draw up a spec and get it designed and implemented, all of which cost money and time. With the blog, it was set up in 10 minutes and within a couple of days I had a mass of posts, labels, a tag cloud, photos and comedy clips and I had changed the template. One software feature I really like is that all the posts are emailed to me so that I could build them up into an article or book, transfer them to a new site or email them to others.
It is taking up a lot of my time but it doesn’t really need to – not the blog posts themselves – I have just got quite interested (aka obsessive) and it has led me to a lot of new ideas. As a barrister I feel cautious about expressing too many personal opinions and I see the blog really as an information bank. I am planning to write about topics on the family law margins but also to pick up on news items, particularly those expressing outrage about the family justice system (open courts, adoption targets, expert evidence).
I’ve not had any comments other than from other bloggers, but from Google analytics I can see a steady stream of visitors and that should build as I post more useful content and spread the word about its existence.
I have sent out a round of emails about it and the address is part of my email signature: what I need now is more links from other sites. My only frustration is that it is quite difficult to find my blog from a normal Google search. It would be lovely to have some more feedback and interaction but I will just have to be patient to see if it catches on.
Family Law Matters
from Jo Spain
Family Law Matters offers articles on Family Law. It forms part of, and is fully integrated into, the Spain Williams LLP website and aims to inform ordinary members of the public about aspects of family law. In other words it is less opinion/reaction and news-based and more facts/information-based than many blogs.
When we started the Spain Williams website in 2005 we decided to base our whole online presence on a blogging platform which has a number of direct and indirect benefits. The part of our website aimed at making readers more informed about family law is also the Family Law Matters blog. We are still very much feeling our way with this – for example, we only recently opened up the blog to comments and trackbacks. It is fairly experimental, but we are trying to make maximum use of the inherent power of the blog format.
The primary aim of the blog is to inform potential clients and hopefully convert some of these to actual clients, especially as it is so integral to the firm’s website. Over time there may be more opinion/ reaction/news-type articles creeping in. As a marketing exercise it probably provides most value as a part of the website, rather than purely as a blog, although over time as the blog format becomes fully integrated into peoples’ daily online activities this may change.
At the moment we only market the blog indirectly by making sure its existence is recorded in the various social bookmarking and blogging directories. We are still at an early stage with regards to comments as we only enabled this recently.
We use TypePad as our blogging platform, which is remarkably powerful and also easy to use. The blog is fully hosted for a yearly subscription which is incredibly reasonable and given that our whole online presence is on this one platform it is unbeatable. Compared with the way most companies host their online presence this is very cost effective, maintainable and future proof.
We are certainly going to continue to blog one way or another although the way we use it may change.
Family Lore
from John Bolch
I am a solicitor with Winch & Winch a general practice based in Chatham, Kent. For twenty years I’ve specialised in family law, now being a member of Resolution and the Law Society’s Family Law Panel. I have always had an interest in computers, going back to the Sinclair ZX81 (remember that?) and including programming and website building.
I had been contemplating writing a blog for some while but I wasn’t sure I had anything interesting to say. I then read Rupert White’s article about blogging in the Gazette in January 2006 and thought “why not?” Within a couple of days Family Lore was up and running. I have now written in excess of 330 posts, so perhaps I did have something to say, even if not all of it is profound, and the blog now gets over 2000 hits per month.
Family Lore comprises “random thoughts of a family lawyer” – primarily my personal views upon most aspects of family law. It is aimed at both the profession and the public and, where possible, I try to inject a little humour into a usually humourless subject!
Family Lore has generated some business, but it was never designed or intended as a marketing tool. I have, however, found the experience rewarding, particularly when the blog has been of help or interest to others. I have not really marketed the blog: I think the best way to promote a blog is to get other people to link to it. Otherwise, if the blog has plenty of content and is regularly updated, people should find it via the usual search engines.
Family Lore is written using Blogger, which is free and generally easy to use, but is perhaps not so fully featured as some payware services such as Typepad. I recently purchased my own domain name, but the blog is still hosted by Blogger.
Family Lore receives a reasonable number of comments, particularly since I stopped comment moderation recently. They usually show a genuine interest in the subject, although the odd spam or abusive comment has to be deleted.
What does the future hold? I do expect to still be blogging in a year’s time, but this is a fast-moving technology, and what form Family Lore will then take, who knows?
Judith’s Divorce Blog
from Judith Middleton
My blog (judithsdivorceblog.blogspot.com) is a random collection of stories which I describe as reflections and emotions associated with divorce as perceived by an experienced divorce practitioner (with Latimer Hinks>/a>). Some commonsense is brought to the page, in so far as I try to intermingle press releases from Resolution within it.
It began in June this year when our in-house marketing guru approached me about a course she’d been on, highlighting the benefits of social networking. I was hardly enraptured by the idea which sounded as far removed from being sociable as I could imagine and was apparently based on a US perspective where you join sites like LinkedIn and business just happens! I looked at a number of these sites and suggested to her that if she wanted to network, I would assist by giving her a blog to refer to and so the project started.
Initially I experimented for a few weeks on Yahoo 360 but, as interest grew, set up a page using Blogger software. Despite my initial reservations, I’ve enjoyed finding what I’d like to describe as a literary side to my nature. I’ve also undergone a steep learning curve so far as widgets, blidgets, RSS feeds and analytics are concerned.
I only discovered the other family law blogs after beginning to publish mine, so was very relieved to discover that they all have unique angles and I hope that I’m not treading on anyone’s toes.
I’m using Feedburner to distribute entries to the blog and one of our regional newspapers has contacted me about featuring it in a regular weekly section and on its website too. Essentially I see it as a promotional tool rather than a marketing exercise in its own right.
Whilst Blogger isn’t perfect, it is user friendly. There are some slight irritations when it fails to justify all text properly or I can’t put something on the page quite where I want it to be, but you don’t get everything from a free service. I’ve only just opened up the comments facility in the blog but am finding it a little difficult to manage, as a gremlin in the system sends me the same comment to approve three or four times.
At the moment I am thoroughly enjoying what I regard as an experience in rediscovering my imagination and, unless I find a better outlet for my creative self, am confident that I’ll still be blogging for a long time yet.
Benussi Blog
from Diane Benussi
My blog (benussiblog.blogspot.com) deals with the emotional fallout of divorce and covers a wide range of issues, from how to help children deal with their parents’ break up to how to reinvent your image after your marriage breaks up. It also provides thoughts and advice on preventing problems that could lead to divorce, such as adultery or a stressful Christmas.
I decided to write a blog for two reasons: firstly, my Birmingham-based niche matrimonial practice, Benussi & Co, prides itself on being a law firm with a difference and when I launched the blog last autumn, I believed it was a “first” for a divorce lawyer. Secondly, Benussi & Co also prides itself on delivering “discreet divorce with care and compassion”. Getting the best possible financial outcome for our clients is, of course, very important, but we also want them to walk away from the divorce process with their emotional equilibrium restored. Although care and compassion are built into our legal work with clients, I thought it would be useful to create a blog that covered pertinent topics from which they – as well as people experiencing problems in their marriage – could glean some useful and comforting advice. So, in a way, it’s like an after-care service.
I like to think the blog is of help to people, but it has also proved useful as a marketing tool. We promote it on all our letters and it recently came to the notice of The Lawyer magazine, which wrote a short piece about it and described it as “worth a read”.
My blog isn’t intended to be interactive: I do not want to jeopardise our commitment to confidentiality. It’s an opportunity to access information rather than spark a debate, so feedback is limited. It has created interest in the media and has led to an article being commissioned by Good Housekeeping magazine.
I use Blogger which is fine for what I need. We pay a small monthly charge to a third party who looks after our website and posts the blog entries on our behalf.
Will I still be writing the Benussi Blog in a year’s time? I’m pretty sure I will. One day I may even turn it into a book.
