Mayer Brown hires leading law professor blogger

Did Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw bring UCLA Professor Eugene Volokh into the firm’s litigation practice group as an academic affiliate because of the Professor’s leading law blog? I wouldn’t bet against it.

No doubt Volokh has all the right stuff being a former clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, having written textbooks, law review articles etc. But I see Volohk’s blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, having taken him to a whole new level – rockstar status among both lawyers and non-lawyers on the net. I’d want the guy on my team for the name recognition alone.

Mayer Brown’s press release didn’t hesitate to mention the blog:

He is ..the founder and the coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy (http://volokh.com), one of the first and most respected Weblogs on legal topics.

Maybe Professor Volokh can give Mayer Brown’s marketing team a nudge into the blog world. The Mayer Brown publications section on their Web site may contain some great content but it’s being wasted in PDF’s not being properly indexed by subject on the search engines. Getting that content into a professional blog design would cost far less than PDF’s, something that Sheppard Mullin can attest to. Mayer Brown is also ignoring the ability of RSS feeds to get their lawyers’ intellectual capital in front of their target audience.