Blogs: ‘Back to the future’ for lawyer marketing

Emily Dooley, a staff writer for the Cape Cod News, calls blogs a virtual coffeehouse. Lee Rainie, director of the Pew project, which studies the impact of the Internet on social culture says blogs offer a new kind of civic arena, a town square open to all. This from Internet goes blog wild, a story in today’s Cape Cod News.

I’ve spoken to some of the finest lawyers in the country who light up when talking about the day when lawyers met new clients in coffeehouses and barbershops. There was no overboard lawyer advertising giving us in the legal profession a bad name.

Maybe I’m naive but I imagine days 150 years ago when lawyers were often heard in civic arenas and town squares. Heck, lawyers were highly educated people trained to be advocates. Why wouldn’t we be outspoken in these arenas?

Decades and perhaps centuries later, it’s ‘back to the future’ for lawyer marketing. From the story:

About 120 million Americans use the Internet, and 32 million read blogs, online journals that unfold into conversations by way of reader comments and replies, the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported in January……As of Friday, the largest blog search engine, Technorati.com, was tracking 20.6 million worldwide blogs, a hefty number considering 62 percent of online Americans have no idea what they are.

Think back decades and centuries. Lawyers took part in civic discussions and discussed local legal issues and answered legal questions in coffeehouses. Today, lawyers can take part in such discussions via blogs without ever leaving the office.