Can a lawyer provide quality legal services without reading niche blogs?

Reading Houston attorney and veteran blogger Tom Kirkendall’s post on the evolution of blogging I was struck by his acknowledgment of just how important law blogs have become to practicing lawyers.

As I mentioned in a presentation that I gave on blogs last year at the State Bar of Texas Bankruptcy Seminar, if a lawyer today is not at least periodically reading the specialized blawgs that are addressing the key issues, developments and ideas that are related to the matters on which he or she is providing service to clients, then that lawyer almost certainly is not providing the best quality of service to the clients that is currently available in the marketplace of legal services.

Raises the legitimate question whether lawyers not reading blogs focused in their areas of practice are doing what they can to stay up to speed. If I were still practicing, I would be subscribe to key blogs as well as getting RSS feeds by keyword and key phrases from Google Blog Search and Google News. And there’s no question doing the same would make me a better lawyer.

Sure, blogs are secondary sources and not precedent like code, regulations, and case law. But they are so darn easy to follow via a RSS newsreader. Takes minimal time. Why not get other thought leader’s summaries of and insight on legal precedent and legal news?

I’m in agreement with Tom that a lawyer not following specialized blogs addressing key issues, developments and ideas related to matters on which he or she is providing service to clients is not providing the best quality of legal service.

What do you think?