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

Today our LexBlog Q & A with Dennis Kennedy continues. Part 1, in which Dennis describes his experience in the blogosphere and whether his early predictions about its future were accurate, went live yesterday.

Part 2 features three more of Dennis' answers, where he describes the rewards blogging has brought him, the value he sees in niche blogs and more.

1. Rob La Gatta: What is the single biggest reward you've found in blogging, and what keeps you going at it each day?

Dennis Kennedy: Blogging is FUN. People tend to write and talk about the ROI of blogging, marketing principles, and other analytical topics. The untold secret of blogging is that it is really fun. There, I've told the secret.

I mentioned the biggest reward at the end of the last question. Kevin O'Keefe said to me recently that he thought that one big difference between the early days of legal blogging and now is that the early bloggers were all friends before we started blogging. That's a common perception. However, the fact is that we did not know each other at all. We became friends because of our blogging. It's so interesting how the perception is the reverse of what happened.

I've often said that the best thing about blogging is that it provided a way for the "Between Lawyers" group to be friends. That's a fantastic group of people and now it seems like we were best friends in college or something like that. It's a fascinating phenomenon.

I've often told people that I'm at an age where you don't expect to make a lot of new close friends, but because of blogging, that is happening. If not for blogging, I wouldn't have met Matt Homann and done the LexThink! events, or met the Rethink IP guys, or connected with a whole long list of other great people.

That makes it hard for me to think of blogging in terms of just being a vehicle for marketing. Yeah, I can trace Google ranking, media interviews, speaking gigs, the ABA Journal legal tech column I'm now writing, business opportunities, and much more directly to my blog, but the real reward to me has been the people, the opportunity to participate in the conversation, and the outlet for my writing that blogging has provided.

What keeps me blogging every day? Blogging for a long time is hard work. I'm coming up on 5 years of writing 3 – 5 posts a week (that was my original goal). That's in addition to the regular columns I write, white papers, other articles and the book project Tom Mighell and I have just finished. That book, The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies, and the opportunity to write with Tom, who I've always considered the most knowledgeable lawyer on the subject of blogging, would not have happened without my blog.

I will note that nothing has had the negative impact on the quantity and regularity of my posts than writing a book has. I'll be glad to get back to regular writing on my blog.

I've often defined a blog as "an online newspaper or magazine column without the newspaper or magazine." I've always conceived of my blog as a way to write a regular column on what interests me. I can usually find topics that interest me or potentially interest my audience. The hard part for me often is narrowing down the potential topics to the one that I want to write about. I can find potential blog posts anywhere and all day long. For example, there are several blog post ideas in this conversation. Actually writing the posts is a little harder than thinking up the posts. I keep lists of potential blog topics and I monitor a lot of RSS feeds. I've often thought about doing a post that listed all the posts I thought about writing but never actually wrote.

However, it's that "everydayness" of blogging that can put pressure on you. I always advise people to think carefully about how much you can really write and what type of posts you will write. I'm considered a prolific writer, but I can't imagine keeping up a pace of posting several times a day. Setting a goal of 3 to 5 posts a week has always worked for me. Pacing yourself at the beginning is something that you must consider.

Knowing that you have an audience that reads your post and gives you occasional feedback also helps a lot in posting regularly.

See the rest of part 2 after the jump.

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Keeping the momentum going, today we continue our LexBlog Q & A interview series with Dennis Kennedy. Dennis is a blogger, an information technology lawyer and legal technologist based in St. Louis, Missouri. Formerly associated with Thompson Coburn LLP, he now working as a solo practitioner. He currently writes a technology column at the ABA Journal.

This is a lengthy interview. But rather than edit it down, which would eliminate some of Dennis' thoughtful commentary, I've decided to split it into a two parter (like we did with our Ernest Svenson interview). Below you'll find part 1 of my e-mail chat with Dennis; check back tomorrow morning for part 2.

1. Rob La Gatta: You got involved with legal blogs quite early in the game. What drove you to get started in this new medium at a time when there were so few blogs around?

Dennis Kennedy: My friend Jerry Lawson likes to remind me that I suggested in an article in December 2000 that blogs might be a good vehicle for certain types of lawyers. After saying that, I kept reading blogs and thinking about blogging for more than two years before I started my own blog. When I started my blog in February 2003, I actually felt that not only was I a late adopter, but maybe I had missed the whole blogging thing. Fortunately, I hadn't.

I read blogs from the early days of blogging - Dave Winer's Scripting News blog was a big influence on me. Winer's blog also fueled my interest in RSS feeds, a topic which is, to me, the most fascinating part of the blogging phenomenon. The truth be told, I started my blog more because I wanted to have an RSS feed than because I wanted to have a "blog." I was reading blogs via RSS feeds through a newsreader as soon as I learned about newsreaders.

In many ways, the non-legal blogs were bigger influences on me than legal blogs, but I could see the dawn of the legal blogging era. There's no question that some of the best-known early legal bloggers - Denise Howell, Ernie Svenson, Marty Schwimmer and Tom Mighell (with whom I work on the Between Lawyers blog, and the earlier Blawg Channel blog) - influenced me, demonstrated the potential for law-related blogs, and pushed me to blogging. Rick Klau's blog was another big influence, as was Sabrina Pacifici's beSpacific blog, which showed how professional a blog could be.

I spent an unbelievably long time researching the available blogging software and the options I had. The real key to my blog's launch was the availability of the Movable Type blogging software and figuring out, with Tom Bassett, my then web host, how to get it working. Most importantly, I could host my blog on my web server and Movable Type would automatically generate an RSS feed for me. I was such an RSS fanatic that I had already started producing an RSS feed for my website by hand.

It took more time than people might expect to decide on a name for my blog (DennisKennedy.Blog). I chose the name because anything that I wanted to write about would be "on topic." I was already reasonably well-known for my website and my articles on legal technology and other topics, so that made me a little different from other early lawyer bloggers. I saw the blog as a new channel for my writing and a place to experiment with a new medium to find a new audience. It also was a way to experiment with some of the ideas Jerry Lawson, Brenda Howard and I were writing about in our Internet Roundtable columns on Internet marketing for lawyers. It all came together in February 2003 when I gave myself the blog for my birthday present.

In truth, I simply reached a point where I simply could not have gone any longer without having my own blog.

See the rest of part 1 after the jump.

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