Legal News

Lawyers, Looking to Launch a Blog? Read This First

By Ashby Jones

Looking to ramp up your book of business? You could try to ramp it up the old fashioned way, do some lunches with your current clients, start networking with old law-school buddies, think about dabbling in IP work. Or — it is 2010 — you could start a blog.

On its surface, it doesn’t seem like a bad idea. You’re generally up to speed on the area in which you practice — and send out periodic memos to your existing clients anyway. Why not just put it on the Web and build a following? It’ll be cheap, and how time consuming could it be? No less time consuming than endless (and fruitless) lunches with people you haven’t seen since the tech boom.

Okay, so, if you’ve come this far in your thinking, stop. Just stop and breathe. Then, before you’ve typed the word “blogspot” anywhere, read this article in the ABA’s Litigation publication.

The article, nominally meant to provide a how-to to lawyers thinking about launching a blog, actually provides a cautionary tale of sorts on lawyer blogging. It’s written by Mark Herrmann, the former writer and founder of one of the better blogs ever written by a practicing lawyers — the Drug and Device Law Blog. Hermann hung up his keyboard in December, around the time he announced he was leaving Jones Day to become the chief litigation counsel at Aon Corp. (The blog still exists, maintained by its co-founder, Dechert’s Jim Beck, and a handful of other Dechert lawyers.)

Herrmann’s article is a very engaging read (though we admit that as law bloggers ourselves, we’re not exactly disinterested.) We can’t imagine, however, that anyone would actually get to the end of Herrmann’s article still determined to launch a blog.

He writes:

If you’re thinking of launching a legal blog, have your eyes open. Once you launch a blog, you will face the relentless, mind-numbing, never-ending task of finding worthwhile material to publish. That burden begins on the day of your first post, and ends only the day you call it quits.

Okay, but as a vehicle for drumming up business? It can be good, says Herrmann, but mostly blogging is for “paper people,” not “people people.”

Partly for that reason, is not an immediate, potent business development tool. If you want to get retained today or tomorrow, never dine alone. Time invested in eating lunch with the right person will yield a more immediate business payoff than time invested in writing a blog post. Once you’ve had lunch, however, a blog is a nice way of staying in touch with people.

In other words, blogging is a long-term, not a short-term enterprise. For some people, it might be worthwhile. But enter at your own peril.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 08, 2010 (boomark / email).