BarTalk June 2005
Volume 17, Number 3

These online, publicly accessible, personal journals are the new publishing platform

by Christine Mingie

“Wake up guys, the lawyer and practice group blogs train is leaving the station. I wouldn’t miss it.”

That quote is from Kevin O’Keefe, former trial lawyer and president of LexBlog, Inc., a legal blog design firm in Seattle. Kevin has a blog called Real Lawyers Have Blogs™. His blog is a fabulous resource for lawyers thinking about starting a legal blog, including how Real Simple Syndication (RSS) and Search Engine Optimization work, how to write for a legal blog and law blog basics. I started a forestry law blog recently, having read (and implemented) just about all of the advice on Kevin’s blog. Less than two weeks after my blog was publicly released, it hit #1 at Yahoo and Google for the terms I was targeting. Last week a legal blog run by law professors from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Brazil began carrying my blog posts on theirs in another language to give it a wider audience. Overnight, it was a forestry law resource in Europe. Blogs are new and powerful. B.C. lawyers should take note. BarTalk interviewed Kevin for this article. Here is what he had to say.

Why should a lawyer or law firm make the move to a blog when they already have a website?
It’s not a rip and replace where a firm replaces a website with a blog. A blog complements a law firm website. It’s an educational magazine focused in a niche area of the law whereas a website is a firm brochure. A blog is published by a practice group or an individual lawyer or two and not the firm as a whole.

Here are the reasons to launch a law firm blog:

• Blogs will far outdraw a firm website in traffic – my blog outdraws a lot of the 100 largest law firm websites in the U.S.;
• Blogs draw traffic to the firm site by links from the blog to both the website and lawyer biographies on the firm website;
• Blogs far out perform websites in rankings when the firm’s target audience (consumers to corporate executives) does a search on search engines;
• Blogs enhance a practice group or lawyers as leading and trusted authorities on a niche topic;
• When updates are made, subscribers are notified by e-mail or RSS; and
• Blogs are less costly and much easier to update than websites.

Where do you see law firm blogging in a year from now?
Two to three years from now most practice groups in large firms and innovative lawyers in smaller firms will have individual publishing platforms or blogs to showcase their intellectual capital or knowledge base. We’ll see RSS feeds from those blogs into their firm sites so firm sites remain current. We’ll see this content syndicated out to third-party sites via RSS so we do not have to work so hard to get published. In one year, we’ll see a high penetration rate toward these things but will still have a ways to go. All of these things are happening now but only with the most innovative law firms…. Blogs get back to traditional marketing and are attracting the best lawyers.

Kevin’s blog is at http://kevin.lexblog.com. He has designed several blogs including the E-Coli Blog at http://ecoliblog.com and Day on Torts at http://www.dayontorts.com.

Christine Mingie is an associate at Lang Michener LLP. Her forestry law blog is at http://forestrylaw.blogs.com.

This article was published in the June 2005 issue of BarTalk and is subject to the copyright by the British Columbia Branch of the Canadian Bar Association, 2005, all rights reserved.