One of the most marked developments heralded in by Web 2.0 technology has been the rapid blossoming in popularity of the blog – the abbreviation of weblog, a web-based journal – as a means of communication. You’ll no doubt be familiar with the concept and you may well have a few among your bookmarks, but unless you’re one of a tiny minority – of the estimated 180 million-plus blogs logged by monitoring website Technorati in 2008, fewer than 3,000 were written by lawyers – what is less likely is that you’ve ever considered writing your own. Why, after all, would you want to? What would be the point? You’re a lawyer, not a diarist. And who would be interested in anything you have to say anyway?
The answer to the last question is a potentially significant number of people – and precisely because you are a lawyer. And the point of the exercise is to give those people the opportunity to hear what it is you’ve got to say in a context where they can become part of the discussion.
What is a blog?
American journalist David Meerman Scott has been a blogger since 2004 and is now an acknowledged expert in harnessing the power of this medium as part of a “new rules” approach to marketing and PR. He describes a blog like this: “It’s just a web site. But it’s a special kind of site that is created and maintained by a person who is passionate about a subject and wants to tell the world about his or her area of expertise.”
Fellow American Tom Peters, a veteran management consultant and author, began his blog in 2004 and is unequivocal in his enthusiasm. Blogging, he says, has changed his life, his perspective, his intellectual and emotional outlook, and no other single thing has been of more professional importance to him in the past 15 years. “It’s the best damn marketing tool by an order of magnitude that I’ve ever had,” he says.
But what are the specific benefits for us as lawyers and for our practices? Former US trial lawyer Kevin O’Keefe now runs LexBlog, a Seattle-based company dedicated to building legal blogs and hosts Real Lawyers Have Blogs, his own blog which also acts as an excellent information hub. He says: “While there are many personal blogs online that are like journals of all aspects of the author’s life, legal blogs are a completely different story.”
The publisher of a legal blog is generally an individual lawyer or a practice group in a law firm. Well-run legal blogs usually focus tightly on one niche area of the law and/or jurisdiction. The aim is to provide the legal blog’s readers with a constantly renewing source of news and insight about that topic.
Why lawyers should blog
Blogging is a simple and highly cost-effective way of raising your personal profile and enhancing your reputation as an expert – or to use the jargon, a “thought leader” – in your field:
- It’s a flexible and fast platform for exploring new ideas and shaping opinion – and for responding quickly to important devlopments.
- It’s an easy way to monitor what people – including current and potential clients – think about you.
- It’s an unrivalled means of channelling online traffic back to your firm’s website – Google loves blogs!
To reap the rewards, however, you need to be committed to some key blogging ground rules:
- Keep updating. If you leave your blog unattended for much more than a week, you will lose your readers’ interest and confidence.
- Be prepared for negative comments. Blitz spam or profanity, but as your aim is to get a conversation going, let your detractors have their say.
- Be authentic, honest, ethical and transparent. Use your own voice and never let your blog become a faceless corporate mouthpiece.
There are three key things a blog should never be:
- a replacement for balanced journalism
- a platform for a traditional sales, marketing or advertising pitch
- solely a means to improve search engine ranking.
As Meerman Scott says, “the blogger’s usual focus of promoting a single point of view is dramatically different from the journalist’s goal of providing a balanced perspective”. But there is ample room for both. Rather than view the web as a sprawling newspaper, he thinks of it as “a huge city teeming with individuals, and blogs as the sounds of independent voices, just like those of the street-corner soapbox preacher or that friend of yours who always recommends the best books”. And journalists are increasingly using blogs as information sources.
By far the most popular blogs are those written by an identifiable individual who is not making any kind of blatant bid for anything other than their reader’s interest and attention, and journalists are not alone in viewing with some distrust those blogs which are little more than ads for a business or a service. Learn to distinguish between what Lithuanian internet marketing consultant Linus Simonis labels “corporate” and “business” blogs. “The biggest difference between the two is that the business blog is a personal blog about the company, business or practice which the blogger manages. The corporate blog dilutes a person and puts the corporation in first place. Yes, posts are signed by real people, but they reflect corporate rules. Bloggers are often hired in order to write and manage corporate blogs.” Underlying this is the same basic premise: people buy people, and anything carrying an exclusively corporate hallmark will have to work significantly harder to win readers’ loyalty. Indeed, a survey by Forrester Research, a US market research specialist, found that only 16 per cent of consumers trust company blogs; regular readers of blogs are slightly more forgiving at 24 per cent. In his report on the survey, Josh Bernoff says: “When consumers say they mostly don’t trust corporate blogs, you can interpret their response similarly to when they say they don’t trust TV commercials or corporate spokespeople. Even as consumers ramp up their blog reading, they seem to believe company blogs created to further corporate goals are not balanced and are basically an extension of a company website.”
Does this mean that you shouldn’t have a blog on your firm’s website? Not at all, though you can choose to have it hosted elsewhere and linked back. We would, though, urge even large practices to adopt the Simonis business model over the corporate and to make your blog original, thought-provoking, ethical, entertaining – and personal. O’Keefe says: “A legal blog tends to become closely identified with the lawyer or practice group who creates it. Readers get an honest feel for the people behind the legal blog, and form a stronger bond with the blog publisher than with a law firm that just publishes a website.”
Not everyone has got this message. He cites as an example a Texas PI attorney blog which comprises little more than cut-and-pasted news reports about accidents and injuries onto which is tagged the stock paragraph: “If you or a family member has been injured because of the fault of someone else, by negligence, personal injury, slip and fall, car accident, medical malpractice, trucking accident, drunk driving, bad product, toxic injury etc then please contact X.” As well as making a desperately unsubtle bid for business, this lawyer is using his blog to try to push his website up Google’s listings by littering the text with popular keywords. O’Keefe says: “To the majority of bloggers, the media and sane people, the lawyer looks like an idiot at best. To me, he’s an embarrassment to our profession.”
Our favourite blogs
There are so many blogs out there with so much going for them (see Delia Venables listing and the infolaw blogs catalogue), that we only highlight a few of our favourites.
Pannones have a fascinating Clinical Negligence blog. This is notable for its frequent, focused, varied and constantly interesting posts.
Intellectual property attracts a lot of bloggers. We like IPKat, which provides regular legal updates for practitioners and clients. More amusingly, an anonymous intellectual property barrister, GeekLawyer, rants and raves daily against the injustices of the legal system. He doesn’t mince his words and makes the points we all wish we had the courage to make!
Tessa Shepperson runs the Landlord Law Blog. She’s been on the internet for a long time and achieves very high Google rankings. John Bolch, a family law solicitor, writes the excellent Family Lore, providing regular updates and comments.
The anonymous BabyBarista, writes a hilariously funny spoof of life at the junior Bar, hosted by Times Online.
And, somewhat diffidently, we mention one of the authors’ blog, which contains an archive of employment law updates dating back to 1999. And here’s an American firm which also does it well – DC Employment law Update.
Daniel Barnett and Eugenie Verney are the authors of Intelligent Marketing for Employment Lawyers: How to boost profits in a recession).
