A Minneapolis lawyer played a small part in igniting the firestorm over CBS reporting on President Bushs National Guard duty. Scott Johnson, an attorney and Senior Vice President with TCF National Bank.
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To Blog, or Not to Blog?
[By Cary J. Griffith] A Minneapolis lawyer played a small part in igniting the firestorm over CBS’ reporting on President Bush’s National Guard duty. How did he do it? He made reference to another blogger’s story on his own blog. Web logs, or blogs, are playing an increasingly important part in the media life of the Internet. But they’re not for everyone, and their power is also their curse. Understanding how Scott Johnson’s blog played a role in CBS’ story can give you a glimpse into blog potential. It can also make you keenly aware of the blog’s penultimate caveat: reader beware.
What’s a Blog? A blog is an Internet site where users can record and publish virtually any type of information at the speed it takes to key it in. Blogs can consist of long-winded diary entries in which John Doe regurgitates the minutiae of his daily life. They can also be informative, breezy, and quick witted and provide users with links to interesting news items or to other blog sites. In the case of the practice of law, they can be instructive and profoundly educational. They can also be chock full of garbage. The beauty of a blog is ease and immediacy. Generally speaking, if you can type, you can publish a blog. Web-publishing applications like Microsoft’s FrontPage and Macromedia’s DreamWeaver can give anyone with modest computer skills the necessary tools to post content to the Web. Third-party websites can also assist would-be Web loggers with a process for making themselves heard. These blogs often become rapid-fire publishing platforms in which users can vent on the day’s activities, the political process, or a particular judge’s most recent decisions. In the practice of law, blogs are usually subject specific, devoted to intellectual property law or appellate practice, for instance. In its purest form, the blog’s author (also known as a blogger) maintains and publishes an informative dialog about whatever he or she deems important. Law blogs can provide readers with a current picture of their small corner of the legal universe—at least from the blogger’s perspective. According to Denise Howell, author of the ar-
ticle “Law Meets Blog: Electronic Publishing Comes of Age,” “when applied to the legal field, [blogs] present an irresistible channel for moving beyond the realm of operational details into that of informed perspective.” Again, it’s worth stressing that blogs only provide readers with informed perspectives if their content is rendered by an informed author. Understanding How Blogs Work In effect, think of a blog as a turning wheel of information maintained by one person, or a small cadre of people. These people are usually monomaniac in their interests and perspectives. They can publish content the nanosecond it occurs to them, or within moments of finding relevant information on the Web. Enter Scott Johnson, an attorney and Senior Vice President with TCF National Bank. Johnson is a blogger who co-authors a blog which is unabashedly conservative in its political perspective. In the aftermath of CBS’ story on President Bush’s military service, another conservative website immediately questioned the authenticity of the documents Dan Rather used to support his case. Soon thereafter, Johnson posted the conservative website’s opinions. Not long after that, the infamous Drudge Report linked to the story on Johnson’s blog, and 250,000 hits later, the sudden surge in site traffic temporarily crashed his site. The story of Johnson’s blog demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of the medium. On one hand, information can be posted as quickly as plebeian observers can cut, paste, type, and post. On the other hand,
the value of blog information is suspect. While blog content can sometimes change the course of history, it more often merely takes the pulse of history and documents its heart rate. Are Blogs Good for the Legal Business? In March 2003, the ABA Journal ran an article featuring the phenomena of blogs - Lawyers Who Blawg. (Blawg is the spelling sometimes used to differentiate legal-oriented blogs from all others.) That article featured four bloggers: Martin Schwimmer (Trademark Blog - http://trademark.blog.us/blog/), Tom Goldstein (SCOTUSBlog - http://www. goldsteinhowe.com/blog/), Denise Howell (Bag and Baggage - http://bgbg.blogspot. com/), and Howard Bashman (How Appealing - http://legalaffairs.org/howappealing/). Schwimmer’s site specializes in trademark law. Tim Goldstein keeps his finger on the pulse of the U.S. Supreme Court. Denise Howell covers appellate and intellectual property law. And Howard Bashman tracks appellate law issues. While the preceding generally summarizes the overall subject focus of these blogs, part of their charm is the personal and sometimes whimsical nature of their commentary. While they almost always post information relevant to their given subject areas, they’re not averse to offering opinions and links to a wide range of information on a variety of subjects. All four of the lawyers were quick to point out that blogs are a substantial amount of work and don’t necessarily translate into retained clients.
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Blogger Comments In fact, we questioned several bloggers about the direct benefits of their blogs and the amount of work required to produce them. The responses of Tim Goldstein, Larry Bodine, and Jeff Drummond were particularly illustrative of some of the more practical aspects and benefits/detriments of hosting and maintaining a blog. Tim Goldstein is a partner with Goldstein & Howe and a Stanford law professor. Larry Bodine is the head of Larry Bodine Marketing, a firm specializing in helping lawyers market their services. Bodine also produces the well-known Professional Marketing Blog (http://blog.larrybodine.com). Jeff Drummond is a partner with Jackson Walker and head of the Dallas office’s healthcare practice. He also publishes the HIPAA Blog (http://hipaablog. blogspot.com/). Lawcrossing: “How often do you update your blog?” Goldstein: “We like to get something on the blog every day. That’s hard for the three months a year that the Supreme Court is out of session. Then we focus on links to news stories.” Bodine: “At least once a week, sometimes more. It takes me only about 10 minutes. I use Typepad, and it’s simply a matter of typing text into an online box and clicking ‘save’ to post it online. What I love about Typepad is that I can blog on the road. I can be anywhere, log on to the Web, and update my blog.” Drummond: I try to update my blog around once a week, more often if there’s something to report and I’m feeling ambitious, less often when I’m busy. It’s hard to achieve a balance. I started the blog to give me a place to put general information and answers to common questions or issues. It seemed like I was answering the same questions for several different clients on several different occasions, and I began to be concerned that I might not have hit all the points when I answered the question the fifth time as I did when I answered it the first time. I found myself saying, “Did I already say that?” on too many occasions. So I started the blog as
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a place I could send folks to get some background and then ask them to call me if they still had questions or had different questions. It evolved from there.” Lawcrossing: “Why did you start blogging? Pleasure? Business? Both? Goldstein: “Pure business. It was an attempt to cement our credibility as Supreme Court counsel.” Bodine: “Business. The blog is a superior way to communicate, and it has developed a following. People even post comments and questions about entries in my blog. I get about 400 visits a week, which is not bad for a niche website on professional marketing. I just checked and got four visits in the last hour! I comment on news I run across, blast out opinions from time to time, and include links to other interesting online destinations. I love to write, so I blog for pleasure as well. Drummond: “I started blogging for business purposes because it was a good place for me to put my ‘HIPAA notebook’ of interesting, recurring background noise.”
developer to create a website for you. 3. They are highly visible. Search engines rank blogs highly because they contain predominately text, and they are updated frequently – two things that attract search engines. And reporters love blogs. This week alone I’ve been interviewed by the Fulton County Report in Atlanta and Chicago Lawyer magazine because the reporters saw something in my blog. 4. The topic can be about anything. A blog can simply recount a person’s thoughts, viewpoints, and news. They can also be used for firm announcements, client newsletters, legal updates, and answers to common client questions. 5. They give the author instant credibility and expert status on the topic. 6. If you fail to set up a blog on your special topic, someone else will claim it before you do. The attention and traffic go to the early adopters, not the lawyers who wait to decide to join the trend a year later.” Drummond: “I’m not sure how valuable my
Lawcrossing: “What’s the value of your blog to attorneys?” Goldstein: “We hope to be the one place all the courtwatchers go.” Bodine: “For lawyers, there are six compelling reasons to have a blog: 1. They are easy to set up and use. Simply go to Blogger at www.blogger.com or TypePad at http://www.typepad.com/ and download the software. Once the program is installed, you can simply type in the text of your message in an online box. You don’t need to know HTML code. To put your message online, just click on the appropriate button. The software will select a Web address for you.
blog is to other attorneys. I think the links would be quite helpful, and if they knew nothing about HIPAA and needed some very basic information, it might be useful. Also, if they happen to be looking for information on something that’s a hot topic I’ve recently hit on, they might find it useful. Of course, I don’t want to make it too helpful for other attorneys; I want them to use me, not use my knowledge to take clients away from me!” Lawcrossing: “Has your blog ever resulted in getting you clients or more business?” Goldstein: “Not that I know of. Our static website has been much more successful in that respect.” Bodine: “Yes, for sure. When I get a call from
2. They are cheap. Some offer a month’s free trial of the software, and you can purchase the program for about $40 or subscribe at $5 a month. This is much cheaper than hiring a
someone who wants to hire me for a project, typically it’s someone out of the blue. I always ask how they found me. On several occasions my new clients said, ‘I liked what you said in
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your blog.’ It works for lawyers too. There’s a lawyer called J. Craig Williams, at a five-lawyer firm in Newport Beach, CA, who began a blog called MayItPleaseTheCourt.net in August 2003. He said his postings, which focus on his particular area of law, have brought him hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of legal business. He was covered in a New York Times article about all the business he got from the blog.” Drummond: “I don’t know if I’ve gotten clients directly from the blog, but it’s good for client retention. And it certainly burnishes my credentials regarding HIPAA issues to write the blog. I do get a comment from someone out in the world somewhere about every other week, either tipping me off to an issue, responding to something I’ve written, questioning what I’ve said, or agreeing with me, often with an anecdote of their own to add. But it is a good marketing tool, even if indirectly.” Lawcrossing: “Asked another way, has your blog served in part as a marketing tool for your services?” Goldstein: “Not directly. But it has continued to help keep our name out there.” Bodine: “I look at my blog as a potent item in my arsenal of marketing weapons. It’s like the chain gun in the video game ‘Doom’ -- you want to have one. I also do a lot of public speaking, writing. [I] run websites, two Listservs, and am Regional Director of the PM Forum, an association of 3,000 in-house marketers in the law accounting and consulting fields. Each of these makes a difference, but the blog is the easiest one to use.” Lawcrossing: “From your perspective, do blogs have a downside?” Goldstein: “I can’t think of one. The materials we put up are closely related to the work we’re already doing. So it’s a win-win.” Bodine: “In the sense that the laws of libel and copyright law apply, yes. A blogger can
make defamatory falsehoods and will risk being sued; so will a blogger who plagiarizes or steals other people’s writing. If you blog for illegal purposes or for the transmission of material that is unlawful, harassing, libelous, invasive of another’s privacy, abusive, threatening, harmful, vulgar, obscene, or tortious -- you’re asking for trouble.” Drummond: “I think there are two primary blawg problems: ‘feeding the beast,’ and ‘goldilocks.’ Blogs are a great way to deal with a legal issue that is new, complex, difficult to get your arms around or where the information is spread out over many sources or constantly changing. The problem is that if the issue is complex, you have to really keep up on the blog to cover the issue. It can be a ton of work, and you can feel compelled to keep handing out the free ice cream, even to the point of letting paying work suffer. Same if it’s on a topic that’s constantly changing. And it’s too much work to have a legal blog on too big an area or on too small an area. The blawg target must be not too big and not too small. For me, HIPAA is a ‘just right’ topic for a blawg, at least for the minimal amount of effort I want to be required to put into it.” Other Blogging Benefits Like it or not, the practice of law is a wordintensive business. Reading and writing are the mainstays of the job. The better you are at both, the more likely you are to have a successful legal practice. From the blogs we reviewed for this article, almost every attorney-blogger noted several fringe benefits of authoring a blog. First, the constant requirement of publishing relevant information forces bloggers to become news hounds. Not only do most bloggers rabidly consume all sorts of general news from general news sources (newspapers, television, and especially the Internet), they also consume massive amounts of information from publishing sources of particular relevance to their legal area.
Being perpetually forced to publish new information makes most bloggers incredibly knowledgeable in their particular areas of expertise. For instance, Howard Bashman is generally recognized as an expert in the area of appellate practice. Similarly, Martin Schwimmer’s blog has made him a recognized expert on trademark law. And finally, the daily practice of authoring a blog sharpens invaluable research and writing skills, which is perhaps one of the reasons Tim Goldstein considers authoring a blog a “win-win” situation. Do You Have What it Takes to be a Blogger? For now, if you’re contemplating penning a blog to increase your firm’s market share or attract new clients, reconsider. Blogging is incredibly hard work. Perhaps more importantly, it takes a very special person to be a successful blogger. First and foremost, you should be interested in writing. If you’re a frustrated novelist, poet, or journalist, you have a good start. When Howard Bashman was 16 years old, he wanted to be a journalist. For family reasons, he ultimately decided to become a lawyer, but, he notes, “my first interest was always journalism.” Denise Howell’s college career started at UCLA, where she studied English and wrote a departmental honors-earning thesis on T.S. Eliot’s poetry. Larry Bodine enjoys writing. While at the very least an interest in writing is probably one of the more important requirements, an avid interest in news of all kinds is also important. While blogging may not be the most efficient or best way for lawyers to market their services, given the rapid pace of today’s changing legal environment, a good blog can say volumes about an attorney and his or her level of expertise. And that can only be good for business.