I was looking at an article on the Legal Marketing Blog entitled ” To Blog or Not To Blog“. It was an article on whether it made sense from a marketing standpoint for a law firm to create a blog. It is worth reading. My take is this….

Before a law firm or any business makes a decision on whether to create a blog, it is critical that they come to a consensus definition of what a blog is and what “blogging” means to them. It can and will mean ten different things to ten different people. All you have to do is get on the web and randomly go through blogs to figure that out

You can click here for the Wikipedia definition of a blog.

The problem with law firms is that they have not figured this out. If it is a medium to large size firm forget it. They don’t have a clue. They don’t want to have a clue. Blogging is not politically correct and personal blogs are in fact either silently or openly discouraged unless the attorney is writing about his/her workout at the gym or posting photos from their latest vacation trip. If you want to see true blogging in the legal profession you almost without exception have to go to solo practitioners or small firms. Why? Big law firms want to protect what they have. From their perspective blogging can only cost them business. Small firms and solos want to go get what they don’t have and make and effort to understand what blogging can do to help that process.

One of the most publicized/controversial incidents involving legal blogging involved attorney Denise Howell and her blog Bag and Baggage. This is one of the most popular legal blogs out there. Denise expresses opinions and does not worry about being politically correct There is speculation over whether her blogging was a factor in her departure from Pittsburgh based firm Reed Smith, an old guard, large firm.

You can also go outside the legal profession to my brother Mark Cuban’s blog. No one will ever accuse him of holding back his opinion. This again how I define a blog.

Are their large firms who have true blogs. Sure there are but they are hard to find. Do your own survey of large firm web sites. You wont find much. You will find firms that call something a blog

What they end up doing is re-gurgitating cases, things other people have written and take no time whatsoever with any type of creative process.

Then there are the law firms who claim they want to be on the “cutting edge” and spend all this money to put a great looking blog up. They realize you can not blog and be completely neutral unless you are going to blog on what you had for breakfast, how your workout was etc.

These firms become afraid of pissing potential or current clients off. They then revert back to regurgitating case law and re-posting legal articles.

If you are a law firm and unless you feel your audience is going to find what you had for breakfast interesting, blogging should mean expressing an opinion. If your not going to do that, what’s the point…

I just expressed mine…..