Robert W. Doyle Jr., a partner in Shepherd Mullin’s antitrust and trade regulation practice group in Washington, D.C., isn’t a techie. But when his firm’s IT and marketing departments suggested transforming his group’s monthly antitrust e-mail newsletter into a “blog,” Doyle agreed to give it a try.

In the four months since the blog — www.antitrustlawblog.com — was launched, the number of readers has skyrocketed to 50,000, up from 4,000 readers a month. And Doyle has become a believer in the power of blogs, or as they are called when scripted by lawyers and legal experts — “blawgs.”

“It gets an unbelievable number of hits per month,” Doyle said. “It really is amazing.”

The blog still covers the same subjects as the newsletter — antitrust developments at the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, Department of Justice and international antitrust issues. But in only a few months, the blog has helped establish Shepherd Mullin’s reputation as “the most comprehensive source of information on all international antitrust issues,” Doyle said.

“Law firms put out tons of marketing materials in hard copy,” he said. “This is a much more efficient way of distributing material, and you obviously get a wider distribution.”

“More and more people are using [blogs] as a marketing tool,” said Reid Trautz, a practice management consultant in Washington, D.C., and author of “Reid My Blog!”

Larry Bodine, a Chicago area legal marketing consultant and author of “Larry Bodine’s Professional Marketing Blog” agreed.

“It’s a golden marketing opportunity for a law firm to put up a blog,” he said.

Explosive Growth

Blog is short for Weblog. Los Angeles lawyer Denise Howell — publisher of the “Bag and Baggage” blog (http://bgbg. blogspot.com) — coined the phrase “blawg” for a legal blog.

So far, most blogs have been published by solo or small-firm lawyers. But large firms such as Shepherd Mullin are quickly jumping on the blogwagon.

Technorati, a blog search-engine and measurement firm, tracks more than 9 million blogs, up from 100,000 two years ago. An estimated 38,000 new weblogs are created every day — about one every two seconds.

A recent study by Pew/Internet estimates that about 27 per cent of U.S. Internet users — or 32 million Americans — were blog readers at the end of 2004.

So far, legal blogs account for only a fraction of blogs. But that’s quickly changing.

Robert J. Ambrogi, a solo lawyer and Internet consultant in Rockport, Mass., estimates there are currently about 1,000 legal blogs. But he said he gets several announcements every day about new ones.

“This is a very small part of the world right now, and an even smaller fraction of the legal community,” Trautz said. “But it is growing by leaps and bounds.”

Doyle said his firm’s IT and marketing departments suggested replacing the e-mail newsletter with a blog for three reasons:

• To sidestep e-mail spam filters;

• To increase distribution; and

• To provide an interactive feature.

“This is a much more efficient way of distributing material, and you obviously get wider distribution,” Doyle said.

Different members of the firm’s antitrust practice group contribute articles each month; Doyle oversees the content.

‘Forget The Web Site’

Marketing experts praise blogs as an inexpensive way to attract thousands of readers, many of whom may be potential clients.

“The technology behind it is so simple,” Trautz said. “It’s a simple way to create a place on the Web that people can access your information.”

Bodine agreed.

“You can set up a Web site for $10,000, or put up a blog for $10,” he said. “I tell all my small-firm clients — forget the Web site, let’s get you a blog.”

Bodine advises firms to use blogs to showcase their lawyers’ expertise. A blog should focus on a specific legal niche, such as patent or family law. And it should be updated frequently with the latest developments in that area of law, he said.

“What all these law blogs do if they’re smart is put up new regulatory decisions or changes and provide insight and analysis,” he said. “They complement the firm’s Web site.”

While Web sites are generally stagnant, blogs can be updated several times a day.

The other big reason for starting a blog, Bodine said, is to increase a firm’s visibility on the Internet. Google and other search engines rate the relevance of a site by how frequently it’s updated, as well as the number of other sites that link to it.

“The reason you want to have a blog is because it gets much more traffic [than a Web site] because search engines have tuned up their algorithms to seek and list blogs first,” Bodine said. “Blogs are basically what search engines are looking for — text and something that’s refreshed and interesting.”

Ambrogi agreed.

“It’s an incredibly powerful marketing tool in part because of [how it works with] search engines,” he said. “In a time when law firms have been spending a lot of money on search engine optimization, blogging can be a much faster route to the top of the rankings.”

‘Handshake To The World’

J. Craig Williams, a lawyer in Newport Beach, Calif., estimated that his blog — mayitpleasethecourt.net — gets 20,000 hits a day.

Williams, who started mayitpleasethecourt.net in August 2003, estimates that his blog generates one new client a week for his five-lawyer firm, which specializes in complex business litigation.

“It’s like being able to extend a handshake to the whole world,” Williams said. “I can’t meet that many people face to face; the blog gives me the opportunity to get to know people kind of virtually.

“If they’re going to hire me, they can read what I write about and get to know me without ever really running into me. It’s a wonderful way to establish a relationship,” he said.

Ernest E. Svenson, a partner at Gordon Arata McCollam Duplantis & Eagan in New Orleans, said he’s never been much of a glad-hander, and generally shied away from marketing opportunities. But his blog — “Ernie the Attorney”– has enabled him to market effectively without leaving his office.

“I was never a big marketing person when it came to going out and meeting a lot of people,” he said. “But I’m doing sort of the same thing here. People read it and think they have a sense of who I am.”

Legal Research

It’s not just practicing attorneys who have legal blogs.

Several law professors have highly popular blogs that have attracted a wider readership than their traditional academic audience.

Douglas Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University, started his “Sentencing Law and Policy” blog as a resource for law professors teaching from a casebook he co-authored. The blog went online last June — just around the time the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in Blakely v. Washington, which held that a jury must decide all factual issues beyond a reasonable doubt before a judge can impose a harsher sentence than the statutory maximum. (124 S.Ct. 2531 (2004).)

“I thought the blog would be a nice supplemental resource for teachers who end up using my casebook. Just by dumb luck, at that time the Supreme Court decided to come out with a pretty surprising an
d earth-shattering rule about the state of sentencing,” Berman recalled. “It was big news for everybody in my field.”

Berman posted lower court opinions and commentary about the decision. And his site quickly became a hub for information about criminal sentencing developments. Last summer, he posted Department of Justice documents on the issue that an anonymous source sent to him before they were released to the public.

“For people working on sentencing issues, [the blog] became a valuable resource,” Berman said.

The Supreme Court even cited Berman’s blog in a subsequent decision this January, which held that the mandatory application of the federal sentencing guidelines was unconstitutional. (U.S. v. Booker, 125 S.Ct. 739 (2005).) The opinion referenced a document that had been posted on Berman’s blog.

Berman’s blog averages 3,000 hits a day, and peaked at 20,000 hits the day the Booker decision was handed down. It’s also been cited by six different circuits for its substantive analyses of cases.

“For law professors,” he said. “It’s a particularly valuable, different kind of medium.” Instead of writing lengthy law review articles or providing a single-sentence quote to a newspaper, law professors such as Berman are writing a few paragraphs a day on issues that interest them.

The blog has definitely increased Berman’s public profile. But he said he also struggles to balance the time he spends on the blog — four to five hours a day — with his academic commitments.

And it’s uncertain what impact the blog will have on his academic career.

“Should this count as scholarship≠ Should deans give credit to professors doing this kind of work≠ Do blogs raise your profile≠” Berman asked.

“This is such a young medium that it’s still unclear what it’s going to mean in the broader legal conversation,” he remarked.

Bloggers Beware

As blogging’s popularity grows, lawyers and law firms are confronted with practical and ethical questions about such issues as:

• Allowing readers to post comments;

• Posting disclaimers; and

• Whether a blog constitutes advertising.

There are no clear-cut answers. But Trautz advises lawyers venturing into the blogging frontier to take the safest approach.

“It may well be considered advertising by the firm. You would have to [check] the rules in your jurisdiction,” he said.

Lawyers also have to be careful that their comments aren’t construed as legal advice.

“You don’t want to give advice to specific situations. If somebody wrote you an e-mail and you answered that on your blog, I’d be very careful about that,” Trautz said.

Bodine advises attorneys to use the same disclaimer they have on their law firm Web site, which typically say there is no attorney-client relationship and that the site is only for informational purposes.

Trautz doesn’t allow readers to post comments on his blog. He does provide an e-mail link, however, and lets readers e-mail him directly.

Creative Outlet

Several attorneys said generating new clients for their law firms has been an unexpected side benefit of blogs they started mainly as an outlet for their creative writing.

“I never really intended to write about the law,” Svenson said.

He started “Ernie the Attorney” in March 2002 as a personal blog. And, although it contains links to his law firm and other legal blogs, it remains a personal blog in which Svenson talks about his interests in photography, music and technology.

He also uses his blog as a community bulletin board, linking to other friends’ sites, including a friend with cancer who uses his blog to update people on his condition.

“It’s an efficient way to have a group chat,” Svenson said.

“Human beings want to communicate with one another,” he said. “If you can find a new way for them to communicate with each other, they’re going to use it.”

Williams, the creator of mayitpleasethecourt.net, said that in deciding what to write about on his blog, “I follow Mark Twain’s advice — I write about what interests me. Sometimes I restrict the blog to writing about things in practice areas we have, and sometimes I don’t.”

Williams recently wrote about California’s proposal to add serial numbers to handgun bullets and Florida’s self-defense bill, which would remove the presumption that people should back away from deadly confrontations.

“I treat my readers as intelligent people,” he said.

The payback from his blog has also been more than just increased business for his law firm, Williams said.

“I am so much more conversant about current affairs and current legal issues,” he said. “It forces you to read and be current on what’s happening. As a consequence, I’ve become a better lawyer.”

‘Diminishing Returns≠’

With new blogs appearing daily, there’s obviously a danger that law firms slow to launch will find themselves at the bottom of the blog pack.

For example, if there are hundreds of intellectual property law blogs, the most recent entry will have the hardest time attracting readers.

“There must be a diminishing return there in terms of how that plays out in the search engine rankings,” Ambrogi noted.

On the other hand, he added, “Blogging is somewhat labor-intensive. We see lots of people who launch blogs and don’t maintain them. Other people rise to the top and prove to be interesting writers covering interesting topics.

“It’s a lot like print publishing,” he said. “People who write on a regular basis with some credibility and quality are going to rise to the top; the others are going to fall off.”

Trautz set up his blog in February, partly to find out first-hand what happens as blogging takes off.

“This is so new — that’s really why I’m doing it. I don’t know where it’s going. I just want to be on the bus when it gets there,” he said. —

This story was originally published May 23 in Lawyers Weekly USA