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My Volkswagen isn't a blog and neither is this…

beetle.jpegWhat does my 2001 Volkswagen Beetle have in common with a FindLaw law firm blog? At least one thing, both are not blogs.

To my credit I have not tried to sell my beetle to a law firm as a blog – even though it's only got 25,000 miles and is in pretty good shape. To FindLaw's discredit, they're passing off to reputable lawyers something as a blog that's as much a blog as my Volkswagen.

Bob Ambrogi, commenting on a law firm website designed and hosted by FirmSite, a division of Thomson FindLaw, called FindLaw on it yesterday.

A Long Island, N.Y., IP lawyer recently sent out a press release announcing her new Web site, called Intellectulaw.com. Like many sites these days, it includes a link to what it calls the Intellectulaw blog. At first glance, it looks like a blog. It has headlines and several items of text and a sidebar with various buttons for subscribing to its feed. But this is not a blog, it is a page of static text. Even worse, the entire page of text is a promotion for the FirmSite service, disguised as an interview with the lawyer.

Even more ironic as Bob noted, here's a quote from the lawyer on this supposed blog page:

So it is very important that when creating their Web sites with FindLaw, lawyers take the time to understand the added value they receive and the leverage they can enjoy both personally and professionally.

Law firms may have gotten away with under performing Web sites without doing much damage to themselves. But buying law firm blogs from FindLaw, which from the looks of this does not have a clue what a lawyer blog is, is going to end up holding the law firm up to public ridicule on the net.

  • kenrick

    I agree, ( as someone who create many law web sites – over 150 last year- and having created a law site that gets over 102k unique visits a month ) that there are alot of lawyer sites that are not effective whatsoever. But really, what defines effective?
    I think lawyer blogs are interesting, in fact I have some. I don't think that many blogs really get many cases for the lawyers, which means that they are not effective. Effective as a means to diseminate free information? More likely.
    Lots of blogs that are listed on the site have 0 comments for MANY of their posts. Poor marketing or boring reading? Maybe both, but its probably more that many lawyers are not good writers, and their subject matter can be pretty boring. It doesnt matter how many posts you have if no one is reading it, or more importantly, linking to it.
    Blogs have just become another product for many legal marketing dinosaurs to resell to unhappy clients who are not getting any traffic and could benefit from some RSS + decent url schemes with the occasional google crawl.
    Any lawyer should avoid someone who tells them they have to create a blog to have an effective web site. Its complete bull. The formula for an effective website, especially a legal one, is alot simpler than what many people realize.

  • Test

    At another blog, the blogger wrote: “What I found funny was that Kevin's post does not have comments enabled …” I'm just testing that claim.