Play that funky music — blogging lawyers?

‘Blogging is like music, you’ve got to play it the way you feel it, you’ve got to give your own interpretation to the material.’

That from ultra successful insurance coverage blogger David Rossmiller – blogging away from his own blog at of all places a LexisNexis Blog, who asked him to write a series of posts talking about how to blog.

David continues:

If legal blogging is to be yet another display of lawyer obfuscation and tediousness, another clothesline on which to hang their insufferable, flaccid prose, better that it should not be done at all. But legal blogging does not have to be merely another forum for the boring to drone on to the bored – it can be not merely another format for transmitting the same old information in the same old way, but something radically different, a new means of communication.

This is what lawyers all too easily lose sight of when writing – that the goal is not to show how smart they are, or even to win. The goal is to communicate with the reader.

I was talking with an immigration lawyer last evening who contacted me to begin blogging. I was afraid what he was talking about writing to a possible blog was getting too far out there – risking alienation of potential clients. I advised him that when we started working together I wanted to him to hold his cards a little closer to his chest.

And this morning I got an email from him asking ‘Why not be who I really am?’ What a novel question for a lawyer – ‘why not be who I really am?’

Thanks for reminder David. Emailing the lawyer this evening, letting him know he’s got to blog the way he feels it.