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Bruce MacEwen of Adam Smith, Esq. [LexBlog Q & A]

By Rob La Gatta
March 3, 2008

No, the picture at left isn’t of Bruce MacEwen, our guest for today’s LexBlog Q & A… it’s Adam Smith, the 18th century philosopher after whom Bruce named his blog.

A New York City lawyer and legal consultant, Bruce uses Adam Smith, Esq. as a resource for large law firms everywhere. So far, he has used it to publish just under 900 articles covering the economics of law firms.

Our e-mail interview, cross posted at Bruce’s blog, is available after the jump.

1. Rob La Gatta: When did you start Adam Smith, Esq? What was your purpose in doing so?

Bruce MacEwen: December 2003.

I had looked around the so-called legal “blawgosphere” pretty thoroughly—it was actually possible to know everyone then, there were only a few dozen of us—and I saw nothing about the economics of law firms. Since I thought it was an exceptionally rich topic, with no apparent “incumbent,” and since of course it’s a topic I’m passionate about, I decided to launch “Adam Smith, Esq.” as an experiment in online publishing.

I don’t call it a “blog,” by the way; I still think that has negative and pejorative connotations. “Adam Smith, Esq.” is a publication, albeit one which happens to be online. As an aside, I can’t imagine launching any publication today that would not be heavily or exclusively online. And from an instrumental and practical perspective, the Movable Type publishing software that powers “Adam Smith, Esq.” has a number of features and characteristics that you would surely want in any well-organized and architecturally sound publication:

  • The default organizational scheme is reverse chronological. This makes intuitive sense. After all, which copy of The Wall Street Journal am I most likely to be interested in? Right—today’s!
  • Each column, or piece, has its own unique identifying URL which will never changed, called its “permalink.” This makes it exceptionally easy to refer friends and colleagues to pieces.
  • Archives are spontaneously and automatically created both by month and by topic category.
  • It has a nice built-in search feature (at the top left-hand column of “Adam Smith, Esq.”).
  • And it automatically generates an RSS feed.

All that said, when I launched “Adam Smith, Esq.,” I did so in stealth mode, telling no one initially (besides my wife). Why? A number of reasons:

  • I might find the time commitment too onerous.
  • I might find others covering similar territory better, faster, or more articulately than I.
  • I might have nothing to say.
  • And, in any event, I didn’t want to launch into the world with a bare naked site along the lines of, “Hello, world, this is my first piece.”

Of course, after a couple of months it became clear to me that I should go public with what I was creating.

2. Rob La Gatta: You write fairly lengthy and detailed posts. How long does it take to do them? Do you have a particular setting in which you feel you do your best writing?

Bruce MacEwen: Actually composing my columns takes less time than you might think. I’d like to believe I have a characteristic and identifiable writing style and tone of voice, and at this point I find that second-guessing myself too much on style harms rather than helps the columns.

I strongly prefer—almost to the point of its being a hard and fast rule—writing at the beginning and the end of the day, say, before 9 am or after 8 pm, when there are no incoming distractions of phone or e-mail.

But the most time-consuming piece of any column is deciding which topics are worthy and then, worse, figuring out what I want to say. That’s the hard part.

3. Rob La Gatta: Walter Olson said you cover your niche better than the conventional legal press (not surprising, given the timeliness of blogs compared to print). Do you find that readers are coming to your site before they hit the traditional legal publications?

Bruce MacEwen: That’s a good question. My hunch—informed by precisely zero data— is that people come to “Adam Smith, Esq.” for more considered background and reflection on issues. I explicitly do not cover breaking news and when there is a big story (such as the associate salary spike last year), I often consciously wait a week or two before writing a piece, which then tries to explain the true salience of the event and what I think it really means.

I would still like to believe that people find content here that they do not find in the conventional legal press, and that we’re complementary to each other.

4. Rob La Gatta: When looking at your 2007 site traffic stats, you can see some fluctuation: it seemed to peak around June, then drop until October before rebounding again. Do you use site traffic as a way to gauge how you blog (ie how frequently to post, what to write on, etc)?

Bruce MacEwen: Much as I love data ( the economist in me can’t help myself), this is something I stay a million miles away from.

For starters, when asked how frequently I think I should publish a new column, or how often I do in fact, the answer is I have absolutely no guidelines or goals in mind. For me, it’s all about quality, not quantity. It might be germane to mention, in this connection, that the “acid test” in my mind of whether a piece is ready, before I hit the “publish” button, is this: If a reader had never been to “Adam Smith, Esq.” before and this was the first piece they were ever reading, would they want to come back? If the piece passes that test, it goes live. (If you’re keeping numeric score, as Movable Type faithfully is under the hood, this is column #855 on “Adam Smith, Esq.,” which, over its 4+ years of existence, works out to between 17 and 18 columns a month.)

But second, I dare not, cannot, and do not, as publisher, live or die by site traffic. Let me hasten to add that the very strong site traffic—about a third of a million page-views per month—is unspeakably gratifying. But in terms of micro-analyzing it or trying to micro-manage it, I would prefer to keep a firm grip on my sanity.

Third and perhaps most important, I never have and never will conceive, target, or tilt pieces to what I might imagine would curry favor or interest among hypothetical readers. The only enduring asset I have here at “Adam Smith, Esq.” is editorial and intellectual integrity, and I guard it furiously, fully aware of the crown jewel that it is.

5. Rob La Gatta: What is the biggest challenge you’ve experienced with blogging, and how did you overcome it? What about the biggest reward?

Bruce MacEwen: I assume you meant to say the biggest challenge with “publishing” ;-).

An utterly surprising one: Before I started “Adam Smith, Esq.,” I now realize that I was not as critical a thinker as I could be. The discipline of reading widely for content for the site, and thinking deeply about what stories might mean, has honed that skill in a way nothing I’ve ever done before, professionally, ever has.

As I say, utterly surprising: Had you asked me five years ago whether I thought I was a “critical thinker,” I surely would have responded in the affirmative. I’ve graduated from schools people have heard of, have spent my entire career in one of the most competitive and high-energy cities in the world, and essentially have pursued a profession where thinking is the coin of the realm.

But it was not until “Adam Smith, Esq.” that I really began to read for unspoken assumptions, for “what-if’s” and the implications of logical extrapolations of the author’s argument, for internal inconsistencies, for logical leaps of faith, for gracious or compelling rhetoric standing in for analysis and careful discussion, and so forth. It has been an intellectual journey of the first order.

Aaah, and the biggest reward? Exceedingly simple: Meeting people in the real world, everywhere from New York to California to Europe to China, that I would never in a million years have met without “Adam Smith, Esq.” Absolutely nothing beats making those real world connections, and forging them into personal and professional alliances.

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