Please Advise

Most of our clients like writing posts and recognize the value of their blogs.

Others have been dragged to the blogosphere, kicking and screaming, by their marketing team, managing partner, or an internal voice that tells them blogging is the future.

This second group doesn’t always understand that they might actually see some personal benefit or feel genuine satisfaction from writing posts. We talk about blogging for business development, but online publishing can actually enrich a bloggers’ own life.

If you’re approaching blogging as a chore rather than something that fits in to what you’re already doing in your practice (and may make you a better lawyer), these five points might change your mind.

1) Use it as an opportunity to learn – reinforce and expand your subject matter expertise.

I was talking recently with a group of lawyers and mentioned that they could write about subjects other than cases, like a definition of something within their industry.

A lightbulb went off for one of the partners. “Associates,” she exclaimed, “writing posts like this are a great way for you guys to learn! Is there something you don’t know? Write a post about it! This process will help you understand it better.”

Partners can also use blog posts to stay up to date on new cases, events in their fields, or changes in the legal landscape. If there’s something you want to learn or learn how to do better, write a post about it. As Kevin O’Keefe says, “Blog on what you don’t know: it’s how you learn.”

2) Use it to crystalize ideas. I spoke a few days ago with a high-level legal marketer who has been blogging on marketing for a few years. He mentioned that he uses his blog to solidify ideas that have been floating around in his head, choosing the best words to explain his thoughts, finding evidence and examples, and then editing this all down to a clear narrative allows these misty ideas to become concrete, which both helps him understand himself better and get others thinking as well.

If you’re grappling to get your head around an idea, writing a post on it can help you articulate what you’re really thinking so that you can better communicate it with others.

3) Use it as an opportunity to meet new people and maintain current relationships. I’ve met a number of people IRL because of my blog, and actually made a couple of friends. I’ve done this by being active on Twitter, mentioning other bloggers in my posts and leaving comments on their blogs, and ultimately making offline connections through meet-ups, conferences and networking events, but my blog backs up that I’m a real person with real thoughts and am really, really serious about my topic of choice.

Is there a particular reporter, columnist, conference coordinator, or big-league blogger you want to meet? Mention them in a post or respond to something they’re written on your blog, then proactively email them or invite them to connect on LinkedIn.

4) Use it as a way to express yourself. This might sound all touchy-feely, hippie-dippy, but there isn’t always an opportunity in our professional lives to make creative decisions. Everyone needs some sort of outlet, and having the ability to choose what to write about and in what manner you write it in can be quite fun and liberating, or at least an outlet for your opinions.

And, I mean, no one would call Scott Greenfield touchy-feely.

5) Use it as an opportunity to help your clients — answer their questions. Want to demonstrate that you’re really listening to what clients are asking you? Take a conversation you had with a client (keep it confidential of course) about a certain issue and turn it into a blog post. Chances are, if one client or potential client is wondering something, others are as well. Plus, the next time someone asks you the same thing that a million other people have asked, all you need to do is shoot them a quick email with a link.

In looking over all the content produced on the LexBlog Network on a daily basis, it’s easy to see that blog posts authored by multiple attorneys are big. Really big. Especially from the large law firms. In limited cases, as in when the post is long and in-depth, requiring a great deal of research, it is understandable.

But these 500-word posts with 3-4 authors—honestly, what’s going on here?

When a reader sees a relatively short post with a disproportionate number of authors, there’s only two things this oddity could possibly make them think:

• It honestly took 4 people—people whose time is extraordinarily expensive—to write a few hundred words.
• That firm is pretty political, and they think I’ll believe that by putting these lawyers names on the piece I’ll believe all of them had a hand in creating it.

That’s it.

So many problems—especially problems in aesthetics, content, marketing and design—come from individuals believing that people won’t act like people, that they won’t intrinsically infer ideas and points that are relatively obvious, and will instead just go along with whatever you throw in front of them.

So why is this a problem? It’s similar to the old football adage: when you have two quarterbacks, you don’t have any. When you have multiple authors on a blog post, especially one that’s so short, you might as well not have any—might as well just publish it under the firm name (also a bad idea).  One of the primary goals of attorney blogging is to underscore the reputation of that attorney; that’s hard to do when you have multiple authors. How can the reader know who wrote what? How much credit can one of five authors be given on a 400 word post?

You may think this is all semantics, but here’s a real world example. In producing episodes of LXBN TV, I work quickly to identify prominent legal topics and people to interview about those topics, usually by finding lawyers who wrote about them.

Last week the White House released their much-awaited privacy framework, and discussion on it on the LexBlog Network exploded. I wanted to interview someone on it, so I looked for strong posts. I found this.

Five authors, 514 words.

I didn’t have any interest in finding out who really wrote this, who actually was knowledgeable on the subject and who I should really contact about an interview. Grabbing a few minutes of an attorney’s time on short notice is hard enough.

So, for the interview, I grabbed Foley Hoag lawyer Colin Zick, who wrote this post. It’s less substantial than the aforementioned one, but Zick writes all his own stuff (he manages the Foley Hoag privacy blog by himself) and I know with certainty the subject is on his radar.

Honestly, other journalists are going to act the exact same way. Potential and existing clients wanting to find out more about a subject may as well.

By blogging, you’re looking to build valuable relationships through content. That’s hard to do when your relationship to the content isn’t easily discernible.