reasons for lawyers to blog

Be heard....

Reasons for lawyers to blog, in no particular order:

1.Attract new clients: yes, occasionally a potential new client will find you via a blog post. This may be rare, but will happen, especially if you become somewhat if an expert or go-to authority for your particular niche.

2. Become a recognised expert - if you become the person who is always commenting, early and often, about trending topics in your field, then you acquire a valuable reputation.

3. Bring your expertise to the attention of media, get approached for comments, get quoted.

4. Raise your ranking in the search engines. This involves understand the best use of keywords and SEO (search engine optimisation), but it also needs regular blogging with lots of fresh new content. It’s value? You’re found first (or at least sooner) in searches, and searches are the new Yellow Pages, folks.

5. Drive more traffic to your web site, where you keep the more in-depth stuff that will give a full picture to prospective clients or media people.

6. Be in the ballgame with IT clients, sophisticated corporates and social media-savvy clients, who are probably all blogging themselves.

7. Brand awareness - have people heard of you? Like publishing an authoritative book, a good blog will bring you to the attention of your peers, the media and potential clients.

8. Provide a resource for your existing clients and your general audience. Your blog posts can become an archive of valuable, easy to access advice. Posts with more depth and longevity can be kept in a ‘vault’ on your website for easy searching by topic.

9. Don’t just tell people you’re an expert - show them.

10. The discipline of keeping up to date and writing fluently about your interests in your field is remarkably good for you!

ghostwriting for blogs

Writing

I recently came across this interesting blog post on the subject 'Are ghost-written lawyer blogs unethical?'

It raises some crucial points, as do the comments left by readers. Setting aside the question of whether a ghost-written legal blog offends US advertising laws for attorneys, it seems to me that having a blog of any hue ghost-written by an unrelated provider misses something fundamental about blogging. Posting your thoughts, musings and reactions to events on the internet grew out of bloggers’ personal desire to connect. The style of blogs retains something of those origins, even when transplanted into the business world. If you merely wish to give information or pontificate, that’s a newsletter. A blog has much more of the personal stamp of its author.

Which is both its strength and its weakness in the world of blogs for business. Despite my initial reaction, which I stand by, it doesn’t take much further thought to conclude that busy lawyers (for example) are going to need some help with content if their firm is to run a regular blog. Using such help is far from unusual for busy attorneys - from having the in-house marketing people draft some information for the firm’s newsletter, to co-authoring a longer article with a junior associate, collaborative authoring is everyday. A couple of things need to be highlighted, however. No such work should be done by people with no expertise in the field. And no such work hits publication without review and sign-off by responsible attorneys.

The same rules should apply to a legal blog (and the idea is transferrable to many business blogs). Certainly there is no sensible, let alone ethical, basis for hiring a bunch of students to pump out content. How is that keeping you connected with your clients?

I’d also suggest some transparency. The contributors to a blog can be identified with a brief introduction or bio. There is nothing wrong with a blog having multiple authors, so long as one person doesn’t pretend to be the lone author. That’s deceptive, and a bad look. In fact, for a legal or business blog, having reputable and interesting co-authors or guest contributors keeps things fresh.

trademark blogs

There's a lot of strange fruit out there.

So you wonder if there’s any blogging going on in the IP world? It doesn’t take long to answer that question. There are some very impressive articles and brief updates being pumped out by savvy attorneys. The nature of the world wide web is to be ridiculously massive, so no-one can hope to give an accurate overview of all that is out there, so here I offer just a very few personal favourites and some interesting stuff I’ve stumbled upon. If you know of any other great IP blogs, do leave a note in the comments.

The IPKat

Jeremy Phillips and his team of bloggers give loads of juicy content about all aspects of IP: copyright, patent, trade mark, info-tech and privacy/confidentiality issues. And quite a few cat jokes. Get your European perspective here. Also includes links to other IP blogs in the sidebar.

The Trademark Blog

For a US perspective, and plenty of regular short updates on what going on in the trademark universe, Marty Schwimmer is your host.

The TTAB Blog (R)

John Welch “keeps tabs on the TTAB” in the US with this blog, commenting on recent US decisions of the Trademarks Trial and Appeal Board.

Anticipate This!  (TM)

If you like a little patents with your trademarks, try Jacob Ward’s blog, from Ohio.

AZRights

Here’s a blog from a London firm - nice content, but getting a little out of date. One of the pitfalls of blogging - your blogger needs to be passionate about regular communication.

Bay Oak Law

And here’s a personal favourite: the blog-style web page of Bay Oak Law of Oakland, California. The blog posts make the whole page vibrant, up to date and interesting.

IP Komodo Dragon

And from South East Asia, this great one from Nick Redfearn at Rouse & Co.

Looking fresh and on top of things is the name of the game. Give your readers - prospective clients all - a reason to return to your site, other than to look up your address. Keep them coming back with short, digestible, interesting snippets about IP and what you can offer.

Encourage them to join you in the conversation.

it’s a jungle out there

As everyone leaps with enthusiasm onto social networking platforms - well, perhaps not everyone! - it is good to pause for a moment and consider some of the pitfalls of the changing dynamic. With blogs that allow comments, Facebook pages that encourage comments, and Twitter, which is one huge round of chatter, it is important to state the obvious: ANYONE can join your conversation.

With a blog you have (or should have) the ability to moderate comments - that is, to check them before they appear. Always enable this feature, so that you can prevent spam and malicious comments. But don’t use it to stifle lively discussion, or readers soon won’t want to talk with you.

The well-known website TripAdvisor is a platform for travellers to post reviews of accommodation businesses. It was reported recently  that the site has been rapped on the knuckles by the UK advertising watchdog for using phrases such as “reviews you can trust”, when in fact there is a risk of fraudulent posts (despite TripAdvisor’s efforts to prevent it). Even discounting outright fraud, a disgruntled patron, whether they are in the right or not, can potentially threaten a small business. Here's a story like that: a small B&B has to battle what it claims are slanderous comments by one disgruntled former guest. Whatever the rights and wrongs of individual cases - beware. TripAdvisor has a facility for proprietors to publicly answer any negative (or positive) comments - use it judiciously. But even that may not protect you against a malicious person.

The ordinary folk who post their comments all over the internet - as invited - often have no conception of the havoc they can wreak, of the potential power in their hands. The general consensus is against censoring the internet - witness the (rather unthinking) backlash against Twitter for trying to comply with specific country laws. After all, the freedom of the internet has opened so many doors and empowered so many people. But like copyright infringement, slander is still illegal. It’s just that both are more or less impossible to enforce if you are a micro-business and the perpetrator is sitting at their computer in a foreign land.

But what about the lovely concept of “community”? The internet has enabled many like-minded folk to congregate in conversation, and business. The wonderful site for indie craftspeople, etsy, would be a safe haven for small creators, you’d think. But small creators are plagued by copyright rip-offs of their designs. Etsy will take down the sites of sellers who are proven to engage in this nefarious practice deliberately.  Most indie craftspeople are very careful indeed about their work, and place a high value on originality.

But what if the worst happens and an item you use contains an image which is not in the public domain, and - horrors! - you’ve stepped on another artist’s rights? Of course you take the image down right away, apologise if there’s been a complaint. Your indie community will understand, surely. Not necessarily: the internet is a wide open forum, and not everyone who posts does so with thought. You can more likely expect a savaging and a threat to the good name of your micro-business. The lesson? Even in the close-knit indie world, don’t expect “the community” to worry too much about the damage they can wreak.

It’s everyone for themselves in the jungle.

Oh, and for another side to this cautionary tale, there was news this week of two young English people blacklisted from entering the USA, where they were bound on holiday, because the content of a couple of (they thought innocent) Twitter posts which offended strict US sensibilities about potential troublemakers.

Think before you tweet.