Litigation

Should You Have a Weblog Too?

By Evan Schaeffer

I've been a blogging evangelist for a long time.

In the early days of blogging, I wrote an article for the Illinois Bar Journal titled "What Weblogs Can Do for You." That article was published in mid-2004,a long time ago in Internet terms. Blogs were something new. You could even make the claim, as I did in another post, that "Generally speaking, lawyers don?t read weblogs."

The other post was titled "What's the Use of This Weblog," and listed some of the reasons I decided to keep blogging after trying it out for a year. In the ensuing five years, things have changed quite a bit. Now some of the same lawyers who would ask me, "Why are you wasting your time on the Internet?" have weblogs of their own--not to mention consultants who'll teach them how to use them.

Lately, I've noticed a couple of other "why should a lawyer blog"-type posts. If you're thinking about blogging yourself, you might want to take a look--

• "Seven Years of Jottings. Why?" from Jottings By An Employer's Lawyer;
• "Why Blog? 10.5 Good Reasons," from Pittsburgh Legal Back-Talk.

There's also a recent blogging article that's along the same lines: "A Blogging Guide for St. Louis (and Other) Lawyers (and Others)." The article is a sort of roundtable with some early blogging adopters, all from St. Louis, Dennis Kennedy, Matt Homann, George Lenard, and me.

Finally, for an interesting contrary view, see this post at Legal Blog Watch: "The Demise of the Legal Blogsophere." 

Full post as published by The Illinois Trial Practice Blog on July 30, 2009 (boomark / email).