December 2006

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Reasons not to blog

2 December 2006 in Blogging

Another great post sourced from this month’s Blawg Review is US attorney Brett Trout’s Why Lawyers Should Not Blog.

The culture of some law firms is simply not conducive to blogging. Blogging simply emphasizes the firm culture. If the law firm is filled with quality attorneys, blogs will are beneficial, not only to the law firm, but to their clients as well.

If the firm has its share of overbilling, underqualified lawyers who would have difficulty practicing their way out of a wet paper bag, however, it is a different story. In a law firm which routinely oversells and underdelivers, a blog would simply make this apparent to prospective clients BEFORE they hired the law firm. It would also provide clients a forum to comment on the job they believe the law firm did for them.

I commend you to view the original post and read Brett’s blog, but cannot resist quoting in full his list of reasons why some law firms should probably not blog:

Scared what the attorneys might say
Lots and lots of secrets
Right hand does not know what the left is doing
Figure the less clients know the better
The lawyers are bad writers
The firm lacks personality
The lawyers lack smarts, honesty, talent etc.
The lawyers at the top are control freaks
Firm does not work and play well with others
Lacks basic communication skills
Culturally neither open nor transparent
Not concerned about clients once they are in the door
Scared what past clients will say
Lots of disgruntled employees
The firm is pure evil (’cause you cannot fool the Blogosphere forever)

Trainee love

1 December 2006 in Blogging, Legal practice

More than two months on, Watson Farley & Williams continue to show no remorse, persisting in publishing their so-called Trainee Law Blog, whose failings I have previously summed up. We’re now on episode 23.

On its launch in late September, Legal Week quickly posted a story about it, sans any investigation, describing it as “possibly the most fashionable law firm marketing initiative”.

Roll on Friday actually read it, finding it, like the Andrex puppy, “lovely, if a little one sided”.

Justin Patten was the first to “wonder if this actually is a blog”, commenting that “the law firm has committed an error with the initiative”.

PR Guy viewed it as “a bit like your granddad turning up at club with an open neck shirt and medallion” and more recently Web Fly has referred to it as “a masterclass in how not to launch a blog”.

Charon QC also questioned its blog credentials, seeing it nevertheless as a reasonable idea but “pregnant with the control apparatus”, and launching, in response, his own Muttley Dastardly LLP – a blog for the modern era.

The most detailed critique of this “Blog Fuckwittery” was from web consultant Suw Charman in her Strange Attractor blog on Corante, who saw it as “something truly atrocious” and filed her post under the afore-mentioned category in some august company.

As always, Geeklawyer was not shy to suggest of this “embarrassingly gauche … pseudo blog” that the firm should

yank it and do the job properly. We’ll try and pretend we never saw it. Or at least the other bloggers will; Geeklawyer will rub it in your face forever – but then he’s a sadist, it’s what he has to do.

It’s a bit late now for them to yank it and do it properly and they will forever be tainted with the flack, but I’d shut up if they just changed “Law Blog” to “Love Letters” or some such.

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