UK law blogs popular marketing tool for solicitors and barristers

Law blogs aren’t unique to the States. UK law blogs are becoming a valuable business and marketing tool for English solicitors and barristers reports the Law Gazette, the website for the official magazine of the Law Society.

…[M]ore solicitors now consider blogging as a route to business and personal enhancement, with the number of legal Web logs based in the UK growing by the week……Blogs are often touted as being a method of better marketing, or at least another channel to find clients – what the corporate world calls another ‘route to market’. But seeing blogs like this is, according to those in the know, to misread their value in a way that will lead to failure. Blogs should be sources of valuable and interesting content first, which in turn makes them good advertising.

One barrister, publisher of Geeklawyer, also agrees with me that law blogs can improve the image of profession.

From the perspective of the bar, my hope is that [blogging] will make us seem less aloof. ‘My hope is that blogs will play a part in the lamentable PR efforts of the profession so far. If people realise, at an emotional level, that lawyers are just ordinary professionals we may be treated with more respect. That’s my hope at least.

And just like American lawyers, UK lawyers are getting new work from their blog marketing efforts. Justin Patten, a sole practitioner and publisher of HumanLaw reports:

Blogging has given me two new significant clients. It is now my primary tool of marketing. It is of particular use to the small player as start-up costs can be zero, or at most less than £150 per year, and it enables a small player to appear much bigger than they are.

Maybe there’s an expanding market for LexBlog.

Source for post: Margaret Weeks