South Carolina Trial Law Blog

I’m just putting the finishing touches on a presentation on legal blogging for the Southern Trial Lawyers Convention in New Orleans. My presentation will be on using blogs to educate the public and market your practice (.pdf warning). I just finished reading Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s book on business blogging,  Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers . Naked Conversations is a fabulous book with a lot of insight into how blogs are affecting and changing the business community and caused me to update my presentation. So now I have some questions:

• What is GOOD about legal blogs?
• What is BAD about legal blogs?
• What benefits do people get from WRITING legal blogs?
• What benefits do people get from READING legal blogs?
• What OTHER COMMENTS do you have about legal blogs?

Any comments or e-mails from anyone that reads or has their own blogs would be appreciated. I’ll post my notes and presentation after I give it on February 23 in New Orleans.

Great questions. Let me see if I can give some answers.

1. What's good? Legal blogs provide great information for the public. The blogs, being updated often, are on top of changes in the law and provide useful information.
2. What's bad? As I posted on The Practice, there are still some legal bloggers trying to set up barriers between lawyers and the general public. You cannot do that with blogs.
3. Benefits from writing? My readers are always writing to me with questions and making me think of things from their perspective. It keeps me in touch with what is going in my practice area.
4. Benefits from reading? I get some great insight into the law in the rest of the country. We all do things differently, and some times people have unique approaches to problems we all face.

Keep up the great work.

Jonathan

I am an Orlando lawyer. I have published a blog (www.weblawyer.com) and am in the process of launching a new one at www.danielperry.com. My new blog will incorporate audio and video "podcasts" as well as written articles.

The single biggest mistake made by lawyers or other professionals who are considering blogging is approaching this as another marketing tool. Experience shows that marketers don't have the staying power that effective bloggers need. Moreover, clients are tired and suspicious of marketing efforts.

Effective bloggers realize that blogging gives you an opportunity to develop deeper relationships with your clients. I hesitate to use the trite phrase "remember blogging is a conversation" but it is true.

I have private confidential blogs set up for my litigation clients using www.basecamp.com. These private blogs are effective communication tools. I have developed considerable trust and dialog among those clients. In one instance, a client who was upset with the progression of a lawsuit posted a negative comment. Without my needing to even respond, some of my other clients posted favorable reactionary comments and reinforced their positve impressions of my services.

The second biggest mistake professionals make is assuming they can simply post their already tired information (articles and the like) on the blog. The blog can use some of that information but really should be fresh. What good is a caselaw review (unless your target is other lawyers) if the author/blogger makes no effort to tailor the relevant information to his or her audience? So, for example, a case (released days before) in which a client lost because of some misstep gives a blogging lawyer a chance to reinforce the need to not make the same critical mistake. It is likely the client does not need or want a detailed analysis of the case. The client probably is more interested in the fact the lawyer is "out there" or, if you prefer, "gets it [the importance of interaction on the World Wide Web]."

The third mistake is forgetting the importance of frequent and regular blogging. Some "power" bloggers post to their blog hourly. I have never done so but aim for daily short postings.

The fourth mistake is not permitting comments and trackbacks. The public wants to engage us in conversation and the best way to do that is to allow comments and trackbacks. While I understand that lawyers are concened they may be drawn into a conversation that results in a breach of ethics, smart bloggers require that all comments be preapproved.

Finally, the fifth mistake is forget the importance of engaging the community of other bloggers by reading and posting on other blogs (not just law blogs). It is a terrific way to draw others to your blog and to establish your credibility. It can even have unexpected benefits.

In August 2005 I actively read and posted on blogs. One of the best blogs is Dave Taylor's Intuitive Life Business Blog - found at http://www.intuitive.com/blog/.

I first read his blog entry of August 26, 2005, detailing a lawsuit filed against another blogger, Aaron Wall. I posted my first lengthy comment the next evening. Two days later I was contacted by Wall Street Journal technology reporter David Kesmodel for input.

Two days after that I am quoted in the Wall Street Journal article on the lawsuit.

[Blogger Faces Lawsuit Over Comments Posted by Readers - available online at http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB112541909221726743-mVzkKuCzJYZr6fxe38o5ejK_1jA_20060830.html?mod=rss_free]

In less than six days I was quoted in a national newspaper because I've gotten involved with the discussion happening in the blogosphere. This is exactly why professionals (and others) should blog - and more importantly, comment on other blogs. I know lawyers who have hired expensive public relations representatives who have not been able to generate that much attention that quickly. 

To be fair, this requires some genuine effort by a blogging professional. I deliberately made the decision to not simply post an offhand comment but rather to research and carefully write my comment. It went through several drafts before I posted it. More information on this is available at

http://www.intuitive.com/blog/comment_added_to_blog_leads_to_inclusion_in_the_wall_street_journal.html

The lesson of this story is that if you are willing to learn from other smarter persons and contribute something of value to the conversation you can carve out a place at the table for yourself.

Wow. Good stuff Daniel. Thanks for taking the time to think it through and post.

I was in a meeting this morning where someone declared, "I hate blogs!" I was going to tell you what I assumed her reasons were but instead I just went to talk to her so I wouldn't be speculating.

Why she doesn't like blogs:

1. She often can't find what she wants. Someone tells her there's an interesting item on topic X on blog Y and just links to the blog. When she gets there she has to wade through lots of posts to find the one she wanted.

2. She doesn't like the feeling of scattered comments about this and that.

3. She doesn't know what blogs to look at.

4. Basically, she doesn't like getting her information that way. (She's happy to get information online -- she subscribes to email discussion lists and will follow links people send her, but she's not in the habit of looking at blogs.)

5. She hasn't looked at enough to have a sense of the range. (E.g., she hadn't seen one with a topical index like yours.)

6. She's frustrated by bloggers who never link to anything and are just yakking. On the other hand, if there were a blog by someone she respected who had lots of interesting ideas, she would be happy to see what that person had to say, whether or not it linked to other material.

7. She hadn't thought about it much, but she's open to blogs where she could get new posts by email, rather than having to remember to visit the site.

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I started blogging to meet a particular need. I'm a reference librarian at a law school. One part-time Trial Advocacy instructor said she'd like to get some updates about new developments, but she's a busy practitioner and didn't want to be swamped by printouts, bibliographies, long articles, etc. The Trial Advocacy program had 17 part-time instructors, a full-time director, and about 80 students -- and it seemed worthwhile to try to get updates to them all at once. How to do it? A blog seemed to be the best medium. Hence the birth of trialadnotes.blogspot.com.

After several months, I surveyed students, faculty, and visitors to the blog. Many students had not used it much, if at all. And there were a surprising number of visitors from across the country. Several of the subscribers are from law firms and other legal organizations. I'm pleased to serve the outside audience, but institutionally I need to justify my labor by serving the faculty and students here. This year, we've made more of an effort to promote the blog to the students.

I've spoken to a couple of students who had not yet visited the blog even though they'd seen an announcement. They just felt too busy (classes, part-time work, job applications, commuting, family, ...) to do one more thing. Even though today's law students are wired (using laptops for everything from email to class notes to background music), many of them are too crunched for time to click on a link to see what might be in the blog.

That may be the biggest obstacle to blog reading among lawyers and others too. Many people are just too darn busy. (One of my colleagues refers to it as "time famine.")

Of course there are choices to be made. If you want a 20-minute break from a tedious project, you could spend the time looking at a couple of favorite blogs rather than playing Freecell or reading Dilbert. (And sometimes I do.)

Recently I installed Sitemeter. I thought it would just count hits, but it also tells me how visitors got to my site. It's interesting how many people get there via a Google or Yahoo search. Considering what people are looking for is a way to get more hits. And if you actually provide content that's helpful, then they'll come back.

What do I like in blogs?

1. Good, thoughtful writing. I like posts that are long enough to develop an idea but not so long they overwhelm me -- that is, a couple of paragraphs rather than one line or two screens.

2. Reliable information, often with links to other sources.

3. Personality. I like a sense of humor, but not a mean one. For me, I also like warmth and decency -- that is, thanking someone who was helpful, giving credit to others, trying to be fair.

If you give me those things, I'll come back. And I do come back to the South Carolina Trial Law Blog.

Thanks,
Mary

Thanks for the thoughts Mary. I read Trial Ad Notes on a regular basis. A number of posts are more specific to your student or state, but there's a lot of good info for a practicing trial attorney in South Carolina.

I think I'll discuss the difficulties of time famine and how to use aggregators to pull the information together.