Law firm blogs a no brainer : Sheppard Mullin Chief Knowledge Officer

Tom Baldwin, Chief Knowledge Officer for Sheppard Mullin, called law firm blogs a no brainer for large law firms seeking a more effective marketing medium. Addressing a Web 2.0 conference session at LegalTech, Baldwin described the problems the firm was experiencing in disseminating their content before blogs and the unexpected positives marketing blogs brought the firm.

Sheppard Mullin is an AmLaw 100 firm, with more than 480 attorneys throughout nine offices located throughout California and in New York and Washington, D.C. It’s running six practice group specific blogs on produced and hosted by LexBlog.

The problems included:

• Firm’s email domain was about to get blacklisted to get blacklisted by domains of large clients. The result would be that corporate email servers, including those of clients would bounce any email, newsletter or standard email message, as potential spam.
• PDF’s were expensive and time consuming to produce.
• Content was not being seen on the search engines.

The positives:

• Top ten listing of blogs on search engines.
• Search feature for all archived content on the blog.
• RSS delivery of content allows subscribers as well as those monitoring keywords on the major RSS aggregators to get updates of posts. Department of Justice official emailed about Antitrust blog the first day it went live after receiving RSS feed.
• Tracking results made easy through Web stats software; lawyers and marketing professionals like the tangible proof of traffic.
• Own domain for blogs eliminates blacklisting problem.
• No more pdfs reduces time and expense big time. Ready template allows quick delivery of content.
• Lawyers need not write long articles; blog posts should be brief.
• Some clients have put links to blogs on their websites.
• Large email lists were easily ported into blog software.

LexBlog should hire Tom as a blog evangelist. Too bad we could not afford him.