Legal News

Law-Firm Blogs: Marketing Device or Mere Diversion?

By Dan Slater

That was the question posed Friday by Dechert’s James Beck and Jones Day’s Mark Herrmann, co-authors of the well-read Drug and Device Law blog. Given that, for instance, Drug and Device scores 25,000 page views per month, “wouldn’t you expect at least a few of your colleagues to wander down the hall and ask two questions: (1) How did you do it? and (2) How can we replicate it?” ask Beck and Hermann. “Our firms surely benefit indirectly from the attention that this site receives. Wouldn’t our firms also benefit if they were affiliated with (or even sponsored) the most widely read securities law blog on the internet? Intellectual property blog? Tax law blog?” So why, ask Beck and Herrmann, are so many firms indifferent or unsupportive of their lawyers’ blogging efforts?

They propose four possible answers:

“Most widely read product liability blog” = “World’s tallest midget”: 25,000 pageviews is a drop in the bucket, and there’s essentially no institutional benefit to blogging. If the two of us — Beck and Herrmann, the blogging morons — want to waste our Saturday mornings feeding this beast, we should go ahead and entertain ourselves.

Power of blogosphere eludes firm management: Management is basically folks over 50 who start their days sipping a cup of coffee and reading the Journal. Only people under 40 start their days sipping a cup of coffee and checking [legal blogs].

Blogs attract the wrong eyeballs: The target market for big firms such as ours is the general counsel and C-level management of Fortune 500 companies. With all due respect to our visitors — and we love you guys; really! — you folks are younger and less important.

Where’s the money in this? It takes many hours of effort each week for the two of us to provide regular, fresh content to this site, and the amount of business generated doesn’t justify the effort. If the two of us get some personal satisfaction from blogging, no one will interfere, but firms do cost-benefit analyses of marketing initiatives, and this one flunks the test.

What do the leaders of Dechert and Jones Day have to say about the commentary? We’ve reached out to both firms and will let you know if we hear back.

Ok, LB readers, are firms missing big marketing opportunities by not encouraging more lawyers to blog?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 03, 2008 (boomark / email).