Real Lawyers Have Blogs : Law Blogs, Blawgs, Law Firm Marketing

That's the word from Jordan Furlong, Editor-in-Chief at Canadian Bar Association's National magazine and Executive Editor at Canadian Corporate Counsel Association.

The necessity and effectiveness of law firm newsletters have been long overrated. Partly this is because the content is written by lawyers, and is therefore a reliably tortuous read. Partly it's because a general legal update is of limited interest and use to clients, who don't really have time for FYI documents that don't deal directly with an immediately relevant matter.

But mostly, I think, it's because law firms have never given newsletters the attention, support and priority to be anything other than pretty mediocre and indistinguishable from one another (if I took the banner off two random law firm newsletters and switched them around, could you tell the difference?)

Jordan makes some compelling points. Here's a bulleted list, but do read his whole post.

• Law firms think their newsletters are competing only against other law firm newsletters for clients' attention. They're not. They're competing against every business and industry publication their clients read, usually produced by large publishing companies with decades of experience. Unlike law firms, these companies don't regard their periodicals as a sideline, a nice marketing tool - they treat them the same way law firms treat their work product, as the lifeline of their businesses.
• If you're not producing truly great client publications that command clients' attention and generate respect in the field, drop them. Take the time and energy you've been sinking into these increasingly irrelevant publications and invest them in business development activities that have a chance of actually producing a worthwhile return.
• If you are going to publish content, create a Publishing Division within the firm, and mandate it to create publications that can legitimately be mentioned in the same breath as the leading client industry periodical and become a must-read information source for your clients, one that your competitors are pitting their mediocre content against.
• Top-notch editorial, graphic and web talent is out there by the truckload, often underpaid and underemployed - recruit it and retain it with the same intensity of effort you pour into finding associates who'll be gone in less than three years. Create an editorial board, drawn equally from your sharpest lawyers and your most valued clients in the industry you want to dominate.
• With blogging, get 20 lawyers who are passionate about practice areas important to your strategy, who can and will write frequently and engagingly, and let them charge their blogging hours as billable-equivalent time. Establish your firm as the authoritative blogging source for your clients, and reap the rewards that come from being the trailblazer and front-runner in an emerging area.

Bottom line Jordan says if you're not producing your best, stop doing it. 'You wouldn't send out mediocre, 'good enough' legal work to your clients. Don't pollute your brand by settling for mediocre, 'good enough' client publications.'

Want an example of what Jordan's describing? Look at the Climate Law Update published by Thelen. Breaking news, insight and commentary on climate change and sustainable energy. This blog publication rocks.

Kevin Livingston, Thelen's National Manager of Public Relations, tells me Climate Law Update is already beating the AP on some stories and receiving kudos from clients as well as the media.

Sure, tell me you can't do it. 'We're law firm. Our lawyers are too busy. Our lawyers will never do it. I'm too busy. I have a CMO who doesn't get any of this stuff. We don't have any budget for it.'

Fine. Keep producing the mindless self serving newsletter copy that more than one in-house counsel has told me is a joke. One in-house counsel asked me if the marketing people in law firms knew that in-house counsel were lawyers too. The point being they can follow basic legal issues on their own.

For those of you unwilling to accept mediocrity, take advantage of the forces working to your advantage.

• More people are getting news and information online than off.
• Niche publications can be be published and distributed online in a cost effective fashion, something impossible before the advent of blogs and RSS. See the Long Tail theory.
• Bloggers, lawyers included, are being treated as journalists and reporters. Interviews of people your target audience wants to hear from are easily attainable. Blog posts can be repurposed via RSS syndication to display at major publications (NY Times, Forbes, WSJ) and industry periodicals.
• Niche information for you to comment on and further distribute can be streamed to your desktop via RSS for free.
• Journalism grads, who were paid poorly before and who are are now starved for jobs with in a declining newspaper industry, are equipped to manage a firms news production and distribution.
• The cost of Internet publishing tools (not content management systems) are minimal. They're called blogs.
• A beautiful design for your publication or blog can be designed and developed at reasonable one time charge.
• Effective publishing on a niche topic costs less and offers greater returns than traditional law firm PR and communications.

Sure, you don't understand all this stuff. That's okay. Get someone to help who does.

Effective publishing can be done and those law firms who take advantage of the opportunity are going to do more effective marketing and PR than their competition. And at a lower cost.

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If you have not seen it, take 10 minutes to watch the video from HOBO's Costas Now where Will Leitch, the founder and editor of the popular sports blog, Deadspin.com, was attacked by Buzz Bissinger, a Pulitzer prize winning journalist.

Bissinger said Will was full of shit, and basically said that blogs were a pile of crap, and that it's a travesty that people today are getting information from blogs as opposed to seasoned journalists. Reminded me of an AmLaw 100 CMO jumping me on blogs. ;)

Seriously though, lawyers and law firm management needs to recognize reality. Younger people, age 40 and below, are not looking to print for news and info - they're looking to the net. And you better understand better than Bissinger that all these blogs are not crap. These blogs are published by some of the most knowledgeable people around - and like it or not, these blogs are read by your target audience.

The average age of newspaper readers is over 50. Ask new lawyers around your office how many subscribe to the local newspaper at home. Let me know if you find anyone who does.

Getting the paper at the bottom of the driveway before a juice and english muffin each morning is as routine as taking a shower for me. But I'm a dying breed.

And those non-subscribers are not missing out on news. They're seeing what to they want to see, and arguably need to see, throughout the day.

Their trusted influencers (friends, bloggers, reporters) turn them onto things they'll find of interest through blogs, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, IM, and all sorts of social media. Better yet for the non-subscribers is that they are seeing the news the day before the people who subscribe to hard copy publications.

Don't get me wrong traditional news is still valuable. Good reporters and columnists continue to be in demand.

But they need to make their content relevant to a growing population getting their news online. Get the content online with a RSS feed. Have an effective Internet presence through blogs, and what are becoming mainstream, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, so that people on these mediums get familiar with you and your content.

Gain the trust of people using social media and those folks will spread word of your content to the masses. There's a stream of comments with links flowing through the Internet each minute of the day in a fashion that most folks cannot fathom. You need to get your content in that flow.

Unfortunately for most law firms, they have no desire to learn social media. Some just flat out say it's all bullshit - like Bissinger. Others give it lip service but don't hire or empower people to harness the powers of social media.

Law firms are filled with some of the brightest people in the country. Law firms try to use their intellectual capital to showcase this talent. But articles in print and archived on websites or email newsletters and alerts aren't going to cut it.

Those mediums are irrelevant to a growing population who get content through social media. Not only are you not connecting with the people under 50 who are leading today's businesses, you're increasing the divide.

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That's the question being asked today by some very well read publications covering journalism and the media.

From Gawker:

Earlier this month, American Lawyer Media laid off 42 staffers across the board. The company is also "scaling back" plans to expand the scope of one magazine, and moving another to an all-digital format, according to an internal memo. One insider says all of the laid off people are gone, but a sense of nervousness still pervades the office.

And from Folio:

Ever since British acquisition firm Incisive Media purchased U.S.-based ALM last July for $630, it seemed that the Apax Partners subsidiary was on the fast track, quickly evolving from an entrepreneurial startup to b-to-b powerhouse.

Now, it seems there is some apprehension from inside-mostly about revenues. Is the legal market not as recession-proof as once thought?

Earlier this month, ALM slashed 47 jobs across the board. The company apparently is scaling back plans to grow Real Estate Media's Florida publication into a monthly magazine and is shifting Law Firm, Inc. from a print to online only.

Both Gawker and Folio reference CEO Bill Pollak's internal memo:

Folks,

Several weeks ago, I wrote to you about our business results for the first quarter of 2008 and shared some of the challenges we face as a result of the credit squeeze and other market factors. I also described our intention to tighten our belts and reduce costs. With no change in sight on the economic horizon, the senior management team and I have spent the past few weeks examining our business options. Our goal was to find solutions that would lower expenses without compromising quality, and which would allow us to continue to invest in and meet our long term business goals. In particular, we all strongly agree on the need to continue investing in our Web infrastructure, while expanding ALM's ability to generate and publish content online.

We looked at each business with these questions in mind: Are we getting the right return on our investment? Do we need to keep doing this work? Can we do this work another way? We believe that while we are primarily doing the right work in the right way, there are changes we need to make immediately to respond to economic conditions.

Some of these changes involve revising the timing or scope of planned initiatives. Others, however, are staff related and go beyond simply delaying the filling of open jobs. In total, we have decided to eliminate forty-two current positions across ALM and Incisive's US operations. These staff reductions are distributed across businesses, locations and job levels and all the employees involved have already been notified.

The business changes we will be making are also broad in scope. These include scaling back plans to grow Real Estate Media's Florida publication into a monthly magazine; closing down the Operations Department of Incisive's Norwalk, CT. office; and shifting Law Firm, Inc. from a print magazine to a digital product.

Another change in business strategy - and the one that will have the greatest impact on staff - is our decision to restructure ALM's Event Division and reassign management responsibility for many of our existing SRI conferences to Insight in Canada, Incisive's Events group in London and ALM's Legal Publishing Division. A number of SRI's financial events will be eliminated.

Accepting and working through change is never easy, and changes that affect our colleagues and friends can be particularly painful. We did not make these decisions lightly. But we know that our future success depends on our ability to align ourselves with our markets and clients, and to ensure we have the resources we need to develop and grow our brands. The changes announced today will not only help us during the current economic turbulence, but will make us stronger in the future.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to drop me a note at
[Redacted].

Bill

ALM has some talented and passionate reporters, editors, and management folks - one of whom is Pollak. But as with the journalism industry in general placing greater weight on online media, there are going to be changes.

Added to that is Incisive Media's footprint. Incisive is a fast growing digital information provider doing some innovative things. With innovation will come change.

Expect ALM to be a force in legal publishing at the end of the day. But with digital gaining on print, things will just be much different.

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From ReadWriteWeb comes word of a new report from Universal McCann, a top 10 global media company, that social media, in particular blogs, are "becoming a more important part of global media consumption for internet users than some traditional media channels."

Key findings from the survey of 17,000 Internet users worldwide:

• 83% watch video clips, up from 62% in the last study in June 2007
• 78% read blogs, up from 66%
• 57% of internet users are now members of a social network
• RSS consumption is growing rapidly up from 15% to 39%
• Podcasts are now mainstream digital content, listened to by 48%

Sounds amazing that the more people could rely on blogs as a media source than newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV. But maybe not with the Internet being the top source of news for 50% of Americans.

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Mark Glaser at PBS' MediaShift recently asked Friday 'How will investigative journalism survive in the digital age?.'

With the daily drumbeat of cutbacks at newspaper companies, there is less room for investigative reporters who can take weeks or months to do one in-depth report. If their future isn’t secure at mainstream media outlets, then where will investigative reports come from? TV news? Non-profits like the Center for Public Integrity or ProPublica? Online-only outfits like TalkingPointsMemo or The Smoking Gun? Do you think investigative journalism will survive in the digital age or not? If you think it has a future, how do you see it being financially supported?

When it comes to investigative reporting in the law, I'm pretty optimistic. We're just getting started, but blogging lawyers are writing about subjects that would never be covered in such depth or with such skill. And if an investigative journalist's final report is meant to take the form of an exposé, lawyers are up to the task.

David Rossmiller's coverage of State Farm's Insurance coverage of Katrina victims and the resulting Dickie Scruggs affair drew national attention. Rossmiller's coverage, when it came to legal issues, was far more in depth than that of the main stream media. The Wall Street Journal labeled Rossmiller's blog the blog of record for the Scruggs' trial.

Bill Marler is unquestionably an agent of change when it comes to food safety in the this country. And it's happening, in large part, via his 13 blogs being run by he and his staff from their Seattle offices.

Marler is all over foodborne illness outbreaks around the country, often before the AP or local reporters. Employees of government agencies and the companies giving rise to an outbreak regularly 'leak' stories to Marler knowing he'll sink his teeth into the story.

Through blogging Marler has gained the notoriety needed to testify before state and national agencies as well as appear at length during a 2 hour CNN special on the safety of our nation's food supply. And blogging sure didn't hurt Marler draw experts from around the world to a food safety symposium a couple weeks ago.

Even here at Real Lawyers Have Blogs, I feel we're playing a small part in exposing the short comings in legal marketing services.

Would Martindale-Hubbell be working on indexing all their lawyer bio's if we didn't stay after it? Would FindLaw and lawyers.com be out hawking a lawyer blog service had we not pointed out that what they started to sell was not a blog? Would we have more companies charging $5,000 or $6,000 per month to personal injury lawyers for internet marketing in return for splitting fees with the lawyers? Would large legal tech shows being working as hard to have wifi had we not blogged about shortcomings on that front?

I don't know the impact we're all having. But I do think the power of publishing can influence companies' behavior.

What's the business model for lawyers doing investigative journalism? Two fold. Passion and and enhanced reputation.

There's a lot of lawyers who love what we do. We've got passion. We went to law school to learn to champion the rights of people. In law school and beyond we honed our investigative, analytical, and persuasive skills. Skills perfect for investigative journalism.

If we can leverage these skills to further enhance our reputation as a thought leader - as a reliable and trusted authority in our niche - we'll take it. What lawyer wouldn't like to get paid doing legal work in the area they love for the clients they'd love to represent.

Sure, there aren't a ton of lawyers viewing blogs this way. But there's a significant number. And the numbers are going to grow.

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Hot on the heels of yesterday's LexBlog Q & A with Mario Sundar of LinkedIn (which focused less on the law and more on social networking), we're shifting gears back to the legal realm. And who better to bring us back in style than Bill Pollak of ALM?

Bill, who has been with the company since it's formation and currently serves as their CEO, brings a unique understanding of legal publishing to the table. In our e-mail exchange, he offers his perspectives on the current state of legal publishing, the ALM's use of technology at their website, and how he thinks ALM will fare in a world where traditional publications are continuing to fall by the wayside. See the full text in it's usual location (after the jump).

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Looks like the layoffs hitting the news reporting business in general are hitting legal reporting as well.

Bob Norman of the Broward-Palm Beach New Times is reporting that American Lawyer Media (ALM), which owns The American Lawyer magazine and legal newspapers nationwide, announced last week in a memo from CEO William L. Pollak to staff that it is laying off 42 employees nationwide. This amounts to about four percent of its workforce.

Trimming 4% of the employees from any organization over 50 is probably healthy. But it may be a sign of things to come as Incisive Media, ALM's owner, brings to the forefront its new media bent.

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As far as legal blogs go, the Climate Law Update – an energy law blog produced by Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner – is particularly unique.

Rather than simply relying on attorney commentary or marketing speech, the blog is nothing short of legitimate reporting: its editorial team is comprised of two San Francisco-based professional journalists (reporter Dennis Pfaff and editor Kevin Livingston, who together bring more than 40 years of journalism experience to the table) researching stories and offering news similar to that published by traditional news sources.

Climate Law Update is an interesting glimpse at the shape legal reporting could ultimately take...and is a great example of how a large firm can use new media to their advantage. "We are both veteran journalists," says Livingston, "so it is unique that we think this is one of the coolest things we have been involved in." See our interview with both Livingston and Pfaff, which covers these issues and more, after the jump.

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What is Texas Bar Circle? That's a good question...and one best answered by John Sirman, manager of TexasBar.com and technology editor of the Texas Bar Journal.

How fortunate it is, then, that John just happens to be our guest for today's edition of the LexBlog Q & A interview series. Though we'll leave a detailed explanation of the Circle for our interview (available after the jump), suffice to say that the site is living proof of how the right kind of social networking can bring lawyers together in a useful web-based environment...one that we can expect to see more of in the near future.

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