December 17, 2007 by Rob La Gatta

Ernest Svenson, aka Ernie the Attorney [LexBlog Q & A, part 2 of 2]

On Friday, we launched part 1 of our LexBlog Q & A featuring Ernest Svenson (better known in the blogosphere as Ernie the Attorney), a pioneer of legal blogging who documented Hurricane Katrina from his hometown of New Orleans and provides insights on a range of topics in his blog.

This post features the rest of our interview, in which Ernie discusses why lawyers can benefit from showing their "human side" - and why law firms sometimes may crack down on them if displaying such humanity involves use of a blog.

 1. Rob La Gatta: You’ve said that people outside of the legal profession want to see the human side of lawyers, which is easily displayed through blogs. Can you see any potential harm that could come from lawyers displaying their “human side” to the general public?

Ernie the Attorney: No, I really don’t. I think that is one of the things that I was most intrigued by, and I still am. [...] You go to law school, and your way of thinking gets molded and changed, and you start to question things more and look for the underpinnings and analyze things. And then you come out and you’ve kind of been imbued with this appreciation and inclination towards a lot of formalism that most people in everyday life don’t have. And it’s very difficult, I think, for many lawyers – maybe most – to keep that part going, while at the same time switching gears quickly into informality (or just combining informality with formality)

I picked the name “Ernie the Attorney” because there was a magistrate in federal court, and she used to call me that. [And] she was one of those people who could be extremely formal and yet be completely down to earth at the same time: she’d see me and say, “Hey, Ernie the Attorney, how ya doing?” If she was picking a jury and the juror told her, “Oh, I’m not married…” she’d say, “A good looking man like you, not married? I can’t believe that.”

That’s not the kind of thinking that most lawyers do or feel comfortable doing. We, for whatever reason, have this sense that we have to be very distant. Kind of like doctors probably feel like they need to be distant from their patients because they’re going to do these invasive procedures and so forth, and so they have to create this distance. And I think that’s a completely wrong perception. I don’t think you have to create distance or be overly formal just because part of your professional role involves that to some extent.

Can’t you just do that part and then be a human being? I think the answer for me is, "Yeah, you can." I watch people do it. It’s totally possible, and in fact, I think it’s actually better, because it puts people at ease. If a lawyer’s job is to get their client to share confidences so that they can figure out how to help them, which one is going to be more likely to make that person want to share confidences with you? Being extremely formal, which people might interpret in the sense of being judgmental? Or is it more likely that they will tell you things that you need to know if you’re casual with them and make them feel at ease?

2. Rob La Gatta: So then why do you think so many big firms oppose the idea of being personal, and seem kind of resistant to that (if it's done through blogging)?

Ernie the Attorney: I don’t think they oppose the sense of being personal. [...] All corporations, all big firms, all large gatherings of people – and large can be more than 2 or 3, in some cases – have expectations about how the group members are supposed to behave. And then they have concerns about certain kinds of behavior getting out of line. I think with firms that still adhere to dress codes, or who say, “Well, lets go with casual Friday, and we don’t do any other days,” their concern is that people will take advantage. And that’s a legitimate concern: I think people can take advantage of being given freedom. But at the same time, that freedom is necessary and it’s important.

I don’t think firms don’t want people to have [freedom]; I think they just don’t want to see mistakes. I think the reason why [organizations] are overly controlling of individuals is because, in their mind, they’d rather not have any mistakes and shut everybody down than allow everybody to kind of try and experiment with it (and then have a few mistakes). It’s just not natural for organizations to allow small bands of people to experiment, because experiment means “try/fail/try/fail.” They don’t like that idea, because it’s just not part of the way organizations think. And yet, there’s a value to it.

[...]

Lawyers are very conservative. Nobody who is a lawyer fails to see that; it’s a conservative profession. It’s a profession dictated by tradition, by precedent, by analysis of what’s happened in the past to determine how to act in the future. It’s not the kind of profession that takes its hand off the handlebars and just says, “Well, lets see what happens.” So I think it was pretty natural that they were going to be circumspect about blogging, especially within the realm of large law firms and organizations.

Interested in hearing more? Check out some of our other featured guests...Ernie is just the latest in our ongoing series of legal blog interviews for the LexBlog Q & A.

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December 14, 2007 by Rob La Gatta

Ernest Svenson, aka Ernie the Attorney [LexBlog Q & A, part 1 of 2]

Continuing with our LexBlog Q & A interview series, today we feature some words of wisdom from Ernest Svenson, aka Ernie the Attorney, a New Orleans-based lawyer and long-time blogger.

In our phone interview earlier this week, Ernie and I spoke about his early introduction to legal blogging, why he believes big law firms may be resistant to blogs, and more.

Since the interview was quite extensive, I've decided to break it up into two posts. As a result, today part 1 is going up; on Monday, I'll launch part 2.

1. Rob La Gatta: Kevin has called you the “grandfather of lawyer blogs,” due to the amount of time you've been operating in the blogosphere. What first got you blogging at a time when not many other folks were doing so?

Ernie the Attorney: Sweet serendipity. A friend of mine had a software company; I had downloaded a trial version of [a blogging] program and liked it. Then he came to New Orleans, and he had a blog and showed me what it was – because he’s the sort of person who tools around and meets other people in the tech world – and I said, “Oh, this is really interesting.”

I realized I could try that for 30 days for free, and I played with it. I guess it resonated for me because I liked to write, and I in the past had been interested in the idea of publishing to the web, but I could never figure out how to set up the website...there were a lot of dots to connect. But with blogging, there weren’t any dots to connect anymore. It was just write and hit "post." So I just kept experimenting and playing with it, and it seemed like it was going to be something that was going to be incredibly useful, because – just like I felt that way about wanting to write but not being able to figure out how to do it – I knew that there were other people even less technologically inclined than I who probably were experiencing the same thing.

The legal profession, in my experience, had always been a place where people had ideas, and knew how to express themselves, knew how to parse information and how to digest it and absorb the key points. And so I was kind of surprised that there weren’t more lawyers doing it.

So, Denise Howell [and I] were the ones who saw each other doing it, and we traded e-mails, and then we started keeping track of lawyers who were blogging, even if they weren’t blogging about law (and if any lawyers were blogging back then, I’d say most of them weren’t blogging about the law).

2. Rob La Gatta: With your blog, it seems you can write about a range of topics and still maintain readers who come back and comment. Is this the way you’ve always blogged, or did you start with a specific focus and expand to rely more on your personality after you had an initial readership base?

Ernie the Attorney: I think I’ve always kind of written for myself. I wasn’t interested as much in writing about the law, except that when I started – as I mentioned – there weren’t that many people doing it. Then I gave myself the name Ernie the Attorney, so people figured out I was an attorney, [and] they would e-mail me or say, “Hey, what do you think about this?” [So] I kind of felt obliged to fill that role. It wasn’t a role that I really wanted to fill that much. So when Howard Bashman started his blog, and both Denise and I extolled it to a great extent, I was really happy, because I thought, “that’s exactly what somebody should be doing to cover the general bases.”

Then, more and more, people started jumping in to fill in niche areas, and Denise and I kept track of who was blogging in various areas. That was great, because I didn’t really want to write about the law, per se. I mean, I like doing it sometimes, but for the most part I’d rather just write about everything. I was a philosophy major, and my interest is…in everything.

3. Rob La Gatta: If a lawyer just starting his first blog were to approach you, what is the most important bit of advice you’d offer them, and why?

Ernie the Attorney: [T]he main thing that I would tell people (and I do tell them this) is [to] try to find your voice. And don’t be afraid to make “mistakes,” because part of the joy of blogging – and I find it to be something that’s joyful – is getting feedback from people, feeling like you’ve actually connected with people. This is not unique to blogging...any form of writing or expression can bring you that. But I think you get that sort of feeling and that feedback and that passion, you see it happen with a greater intensity when you allow yourself the freedom to explore and experiment.

When people ask me, “Well, why do you write your blog?”, the real answer is, I write it because it helps me figure out things. And that’s writing in general; I write so that I can figure things out. In the past I had tried to keep a journal, and I just didn’t care. It didn’t have the same intensity: only I was reading it, and I wasn’t editing it to say something in a particular way. Yet I was exploring thoughts that I had.

With blogging, it’s the same thing, except in exploring those thoughts, you have to think about them. You have to compress the ideas. You have to write it, you have to rewrite it, and so forth. A lot of times, I’ll look at something and have a much better sense of what I was thinking about - [after] I’ve edited it and written it and put it out there - than I would have if I had just mulled it over in my head, or written it quickly, or tried to write it to conform to what was safe.

Check back on Monday to see part 2, when Ernie will discuss why he thinks lawyers should show their "human side," and why large law firms are often resistant to allowing them to do so through blogs.

In the meantime, interested in hearing more? Check out some of our other featured guests...Ernie is just the latest in our ongoing series of legal blog interviews for the LexBlog Q & A.

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