Law blogs : Intelligence agents for prospective clients

Prospective clients are drawn to lawyers’ blogs because the blogs act as intelligence agents on niche subjects. Where else can you get such focused content from someone who has domain expertise on an area of the law that you need to keep abreast of?

Newsvine’s Mike Davidson summarizes the concept of blogs as intelligence agents in his post yesterday about keeping up with the markets.

One of the best qualities of great bloggers is their ability to act as filters for entire genres of content; finding great new stuff on the web, formulating insight on said stuff, and then publishing the results for your easy consumption via RSS.

This sort of intelligent content curation is extremely helpful should you decide you are suddenly interested in a subject you previously eschewed.

Good bloggers set their ‘RSS feed channels’ to collect unrefined content. They know the blogs and keywords/key phrases to follow. The content fed to their newsreaders is culled, commented upon, and delivered to exactly the audience the lawyers are trying to reach.

Take the example of an exec or in-house counsel of a large consumer product company who needs to stay up to speed on legal issues regarding counterfeit products. It’s a no brainer to subscribe to Leora Herrmann’s Counterfeit Law Blog. Leora follows relevant legal issues and provides interested parties both information and commentary. Privacy law? One of the intelligence agents is Proskauer Rose’s Privacy Law Blog.

For lawyers publishing blogs, you ought to be doing the same. Follow relevant feeds. Cull the content. Publish the good stuff with your commentary. Being an intelligence agent for your prospective clients and those who may influence them (bloggers and the media) is a good deal.