Corporate clients want lawyers who blog
Holden Oliver (a/k/a JD Hull?) at What About Clients, referencing Teri Rassmussen's post yesterday, believes law firm blogs aren't worth a lick when it comes to client development, especially sophisticated corporate clients his firm is seeking.
...[M]ost clients worth having--and certainly busy in-house counsel--have no time to read blogs, think about blogs or to blog themselves. Real clients want their real lawyers working their asses off solving problems--not blogging. Blogger-professionals need to get over themselves. A client's knowledge that you are blogging regularly is about as helpful--or harmful--as knowing that you go to the track a couple of times a week with your drunken philandering stoner high school friend Ernie from Glen Burnie. Colorful and interesting--but so what? And with the wrong client, it could even hurt. Moreover, blogging still has a geeky connotation with the over-45 crowd who control much of the work law firms get. Clients could care less if you blog and might even resent it.
Very shortsighted and self limiting belief.
It's the busiest people in this country who are reading blogs - including execs and in-house counsel. As long as 2 years ago, over 20% of execs read at least one business blog a week. The same study found senior execs much more familiar with the value of blogs than lawyers.
LexBlog has multiple AmLaw 200 law firms who publish blogs for the sole reason of keeping their clients up to speed on legal issues in niches - something their corporate clients demand because of the significant legal fees they were paying.
I have had multiple in-house counsel at Fortune 500 companies tell me they wish more of the lawyers they use would blog. One, general counsel for a top 50 Fortune 500 firm told me he prefers sending legal work to lawyers who blog. He told me the newsletters he gets from the large firms are ridiculous - the content isn't even giving him credit for being a lawyer.
Why? Insight and commentary on niche areas of the law. Understanding a lawyer's philosophy and take on things. As well as some of the things Rasmussen mentions.
'What about clients' has dissed the value of blogs in the corporate space for a long time. The reason being apparently that the firm's clients are above blogs.
It may be that their failure to understand the value of blogs to sophisticated corporate clients and dissing the value of blogs to their clients is self limiting. It's keeping them apart from exec's, in-house counsel, and corporate clients that appreciate blogs.
Also very perplexing that if blogs are aren't worth a lick to the firm's clients, why is that the 'What about Clients?' blog continues to expand right along with its law firm?
Greetings Kevin
Couldn't help but contribute to this discussion. This is the comment I just posted on "What about clients":
I have to say I tend to agree with Kevin.
Why do you blog then? What do your clients think of it? Presumably at least some of them are aware of it, even if you don't trumpet the fact. Should the fact you're opining on non-legal issues much of the time make any difference? You also seem to be assuming lawyers blog during working hours. Often not the case. It's a marketing-related value add that many pursue after cranking up sufficient billables.
I'm a busy in-house counsel who both blogs in his own time (because, among other reasons, it's a way of staying current) and would like to see more law firm bloggers talking about niche areas relevant to my areas of practice. I'd much prefer that, coupled with the ability to receive it by RSS, than the "taster" marketing blurbs that many firms release. I'm not suggesting that blogging can completely subordinate the value of referrals and views of trusted in-house colleagues as to who's good at what, but it can certainly help lawyers' reputations and create mindshare in those who instruct them.
To suggest that all or the "important" in-house counsel would dismiss lawyers who blog is not much different from saying they'd dismiss lawyers who write articles, briefings and speak at conferences. I doubt many would say that.
WAC? has got it wrong on this one. My experience has been the exact opposite.
I hesitated commenting for a few days, but I just could not resist. Let me say from my perspective - small town lawyer with a small blog - this is still foolish advice. However, I went onto read the original post - that is quite impressive.
From the observations of my own meager efforts, I am pretty certain that most people do not know how to use blogs and/or what differentiates them from standard web pages. That needs to change but until it does I would not call blogs mainstream by any stretch of the imagination.
I also use my blogs as storage for my research. I do not know if others do not do this but I am finding it useful. Whether in-house counsel recognize this aspect of blogs is something that might be interesting to know. From what I have seen most people do not think of a blog as more than a single entry found by Google.
Why does it matter Sam if a person, corporate exec, or whomever knows they are on a blog or not?
66% of people going to poorly designed blogs think they are on a website. With well designed blogs with sections apart from posts highlighting who the blogger is, what they do, and how to get contact them, the percentage is probably 95% plus.
And take into account most of the people using RSS to subscribe to blogs and news sites not knowing they are using RSS, they just think subscribe.
Who cares if sophisticated clients know you are 'blogging' as we may define it. All they care about is the sharing of the intellectual capital, insight, and the lawyer's philosophy.
Sorry, it is not whether they know if they are on a webpage or a blog. What I am seeing from the little traffic I get is this: people go to one entry and do not go to anything else related to the issue that seems to be driving their search. Maybe it is only me that has this and the problem is of my own creating.
If, however, people think that this post is all of the information on that subject at this site because they do not know how to use a blog, then I need to reconfigure how I write my posts. I used to just think that people would go over to the archives. After all, that is what I would do . People do not do this. I could easily put this down to design problems with Blogger. When I put links in articles to earlier articles, then people go to those articles.
Where I saw all this as being relevant to the discussion was in people being to exploit that intellectual capital. I also do not think that blogs and what they represent are quite as mainstream as we might like to think.
You hit the nail on the head - sophisticated clients. I expect most of those reaching my blogs to be fairly sophisticated. I certainly would expect in-house counsel to fall into the category of sophisticated. Well, sophisticated enough to be able to understand the benefits of lawyer blogging. (Which really was the topic before I started running off at the mouth. Sorry about that.)