Personal Injury Law

Personal Injury Lawyer Blogs: Thoughts on Blogging

The Drug and Device Law Blog has an interesting post on how long lawyers stick with blogging. The short version: most lawyers fail miserably at blogging over the long haul.

Lawyers blog for a lot of different reasons, usually related, at least in part, to furthering their professional career. There are three paths. The road most traveled is the, "Hey, there was an auto accident on I-97 last night." There are about 1000 of these sites written by or for personal injury lawyers who have nothing to add to the conversation but are trying to attract clients directly. These blogs come and go and they are both painful to read and, I'm sure, to write. If you are trying to attract personal injury clients like this, you are almost certainly going to fail unless you have been doing it for years (Google likes websites that have been around for a while).

You know you are reading one of these blogs because when you are finished, you have learned absolutely nothing except that the lawyer wants personal injury clients. These are almost exclusively personal injury lawyers. The patent lawyer approach of "Hey, Microsoft got a patent yesterday" is clearly not going to work. The personal injury lawyers' "there was an accident last night" pitch will also fail, but it is just not as obvious to the blogger.

The second path is the purist. There is no hint of marketing or sensitivity to Google search terms - just pure facts, analysis and opinion. Jim Beck and Mark Herrmann's Drug and Device Law Blog is an excellent example, as is Eric Turkewitz's New York Injury Law Blog. These bloggers certainly enhance their professional reputations with their blog. This is a very effective route, but there is one problem with this path: you actually have to have something to say that would be of interest to someone else.

The third avenue is the hybrid where you write to be educational, informative and interesting, but you are not above an occasional pitch to consumers, and if the possibility avails itself, you use a Google friend keyword you would not use if Google was not keeping score of these things.

Full post as published by Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog on August 24, 2009 (boomark / email).