Five Questions: Victoria Pynchon of Settle It Now Dispute Resolution Services
Today brings another installment of LexBlog’s Five Questions interview series, where we chat with some of the biggest names in the LexBlogosphere on what makes them blog. The feature continues this week with Victoria Pynchon, a former commercial litigator who now works full time as an IP mediator. She is creator and author of the Settle It Now Negotiation Blog and, more recently, the IP ADR Blog. I recently sat down and chatted with Victoria about her blogging experience, how she writes, her work as a teacher and more.
1. Rob La Gatta: When did you first launch your Settle It Now Negotiation Blog, and why?
Victoria Pynchon:
In June of 2006, because I saw someone else’s blog on Blogger. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really cool,’ and I went to Blogger. It was so easy to do that I threw one up within the first 15 minutes after I saw it. I mean, I just immediately did it.
[It appealed to me because] I’m a writer. I write fiction and literary non-fiction. I publish a literary magazine. I’d already written a fair number of articles about dispute resolution, and it seemed to be the perfect venue for me to be publish what I wanted to write instantaneously.
2. Rob La Gatta:
I noticed that you write fairly lengthy posts, all of which have a very unique tone to them that gives a glimpse into your personality. Was this intentional, or is it just how you write?
Victoria Pynchon:
That’s how I write, and that’s the benefit of blogs. I provide a service, and the service that I provide is helping people negotiate the resolution of litigation. That’s not an easy thing to do. Before people will retain you, they have to have a reason to trust you. And I think that who I am – my voice – comes across very clearly in my writing. So I think that if anyone is going to consider hiring me as a result of something that I write, they’re going to consider hiring me because, in reading me, they hear a voice they can trust.
See the rest of my Five Questions interview with Victoria Pynchon after the jump.
3. Rob La Gatta: How long does it take you to write the average entry? Do you set aside time each day specifically for writing in your blog?
Victoria Pynchon:
Well, they are [of] varying lengths, and so they take me varying amounts of time. Sometimes they take me minutes, because really all I’m doing is pointing the reader toward something interesting that I’ve found. So sometimes I [just] stumble across something, [and] I think, “Oh, my readers will be interested in seeing that.” I go to my blog, I put in a couple of sentences to tell them why they might be interested in it, and I link to it. Probably the most time consuming thing I do is look for images, which is self-indulgent. I mean, I don’t know how much it adds to the readers’ experience…I just love to do it.
Rob La Gatta: So is that something that you pencil into your calendar each day then? Or is it something that you kind of just do when you have free time?
Victoria Pynchon:
No…whenever I have a moment. You know, I have to tell you: I had no idea how much of my creative and entrepreneurial energy was tied up in the practice of law. I was working in one of those firms where attorneys bill somewhere between 2000 and 2300 hours a year. When I stopped practicing, it was like someone had lifted a rock off of me. I have five new entrepreneurial ideas everyday, and I probably have a dozen blogging ideas everyday. My challenge is to stop, not to start.
4. Rob La Gatta: You recently debuted the IP ADR Blog. How did its development come about?
Victoria Pynchon:
The IP ADR Blog is really a cross-marketing venture. The people who are blogging there with me [Eric Van Ginkel, Les Weinstein & Michael Young] are all IP mediators or arbitrators, but we all have something different and unique to offer. And we believe that by combining our marketing efforts, we can avoid reinventing the wheel, and that we can make available to potential clients something greater than we could each individually offer. That’s really the whole idea behind law firms. And surprisingly for me, it is not a model that mediators and arbitrators have adopted.
But the real inspiration behind the IP ADR Blog was a 90-minute conversation on the telephone with Kevin. So let me just say a couple of things about [him]. Number one: Kevin is not just my blog provider. Kevin has given me more insight about how to market my business than anyone, including marketing experts who I’ve hired to advise me. He totally gets the new market, which is online, it’s collaborative, and it’s reciprocal. And it’s linked in.
But here’s what Kevin told me. First of all, he said, “You’re drifting with the Negotiation Blog. Look at the top of your blog. It says, ‘Everything you always wanted to know about negotiation but were afraid to ask.’ Now let me read to you what your last five posts were: ‘Release the prisoners at Guantanamo;’ ‘Perfect your elevator pitch’…”
He said, “What are you doing? You will lose the trust that your readers have in you to find what they’re looking for in your blog and they’ll stop reading it.” [That’s] certainly the best blogging advice, hands down, period, particularly for someone like me who has a thousand interests.
Then we started talking about niches, and I told him that I was pursuing an IP niche. And he said, “Listen, this is what you do…this is how it works. There’s a high level conversation going on in the media and in the blogosphere in your area of specialty. You need to join it. You need to read what other people are writing, and then when you know you have something unique to add to that conversation from your discipline, from your alternate dispute resolution point of view, then you link to the people who are talking about what most interests you and you add your point of view to that conversation.”
That night, I was up until 3:00 a.m. putting together a Blogger IP ADR site, just to see whether or not I wanted to do another one through LexBlog. Four days after that, I was invited to speak in London on alternate dispute resolution in intellectual property disputes. Four days.
Rob La Gatta: Just from the Blogger blog that you had set up?
Victoria Pynchon:
Yeah. Four days. I did already have a few readers in London, and what I believe happened is, one of the people who reads my negotiation blog shot a link over to a friend of his who was a patent attorney, who read four days of blogging – and I probably posted two articles a day because I was really excited about trying out what Kevin had told me to do – and he sent me an e-mail and said, “I’m putting together a conference, would you like to speak at [it], in London? We can’t pay you much, but we will pay you.” In the world of speaking about legal topics to lawyers, nobody ever pays you. So that’s how powerful Kevin’s advice was.
Then I called Kevin and said, “Give me another blog.” And that was the IP ADR Blog. And at the same time, I was thinking, “You know, I should include in that people who are willing to contribute to it.” But I think that it takes a special kind of obsessive person to be a blogger, and there’s nobody in that group who blogs as much as I do, because it’s…it’s slightly addictive. But it’s slightly addictive to people who are writers. I mean, it’s a writer’s venue. It’s a place where people who like to write write. I don’t think that somebody who is not a writer really should even try to blog. Kevin would probably tell me I’m wrong, but Kevin has also told me that I blog more than anybody he has in his blogging stable. But that’s why my husband is generally dissatisfied with the degree to which I pay attention to him these days.
But I really do feel that I’m building my business this way. I started this business three years ago. This is a 15-year plan. I started this practice at 52 years of age, and this is the next 15 years of my life. I’ll stop working sometime in my 70s. This is the baby boom…we’re not going to retire. [And] who wants to retire? These are the most exciting years of my life. This is the happiest I’ve ever been. This is great. I know who I am, I know what I want, [and] I’m able to do it.
The Internet blows me away. It is just the most fabulous invention in the history of the world. It’s one of the seven wonders of the world. And those of us who have found it and who are lucky enough to have found Kevin, who can tell us how to work it efficiently…we’re on the cutting edge. And to be on the cutting edge at 55 years old is really groovy. I mean, while other people are getting ready to watch reruns of Happy Days, I’m on the cutting edge of the new technology. How cool is that?
5. Rob La Gatta: I see that you are adjunct professor at the Pepperdine School of Law. Do you find that law students today understand the value of legal blogs?
Victoria Pynchon: I created a class blog, hoping that it would be interactive, that students could post stuff on it and that I would post articles I thought might be interesting for them to read. I put class assignments up there, and they hated it. They HATED it. And I think they had some good reasons not to like it, because things are constantly changing on a blog, and the one thing that students – especially law students – want is, “Exactly what do I need to do and when do I need to have it done by and how exactly do you want me to do it?” A blog is jazzier than that. It’s improvisational. It’s a moving target and they don’t want to be presented with any moving targets. A blog is too dynamic. Law students don’t want dynamic. They’re so focused on grades that they just want what they have to do for that class carved on a stone tablet, brought down from Mt. Sinai. And so they hated the blog. It made them crazy. So I will never use a class blog again.