Real Lawyers Have Blogs is 10 years old : How I got started

“Hmm… I should have a blog.”

Best I can tell, my first blog post was published November 22, 2003. I had not a clue what I was doing.

I had sold my previous company, Prairielaw.com, to LexisNexis in January, 2001. I joined LexisNexis to help with the integration of our community and content into lawyers.com. The purchase agreement included a one year non-compete that ran from the day I left LexisNexis.

To say there was friction between LexisNexis and I while I was there would be an understatement. In hind sight, I can see that much of the fault lay with me. In any case, I got thrown out of the place (fired) in October 2002. So, with my non-compete I was off the playing field for a year.

In October 2003, I saw a brief in-column article in Business 2.0 about a web based blogging platform, TypePad, from a company called Six Apart. TypePad expected to have 10,000 subscribers by the end of the year paying five to fifteen dollars a month.

It wasn’t the blogging platform that drew my attention, it was the quick uptake of the service. 10,000 people paying for something in 90 days meant subscribers were seeing real value.

At the same time I remained driven to help lawyers use the Internet, the right way, for professional and business development. It wasn’t solely through fancy and expensive websites and directories being sold to lawyers, it was through real engagement and communication with people.

But how would lawyers and law firms across the country know and trust me enough to let me help them? The number of people who knew me and my work with Prairielaw.com, a virtual law community of  people helping people, lawyers and lay people alike, was pretty limited.

What would I use as a platform to build my reputation as a trusted authority in the area of Internet marketing and business development for lawyers? A website? A listserv? An email newsletter? Message boards? I had used them all while practicing law and at Prairielaw.com, but they felt stale.

I’d use this TypePad thing, which by then I’d come to know as some sort of platform to publish content to the Web. Yes I was scared, in more ways than one. I had this non-compete and though I was the last thing in the world LexisNexis was thinking about, I wanted to get some space between the one year anniversary of my firing and starting this blog. So I waited a month.

I also didn’t have a clue what I was doing publishing content live to the net. Would I sound like an idiot? How would people find me and my blog?

Worse yet, what if people found me and I looked stupid? After all I am not the best writer (publishing the blog was an attempt to get better) and my design was rudimentary, at best. Would they like the Perry Mason picture, with the quip, “Hmm, maybe I should have a blog?”

I picked up a couple books on blogging, yes there were some at Borders. Rebecca Blood’s ‘The Weblog Handbook‘ not only helped me understand what a blog was, but she also inspired the heck out of me with her notion that if people trusted a person’s blogging, they would hire the person should a need for services arise in the area the blogger was writing about. Perfect for lawyers, I thought.

Rather than call my blog Internet marketing for lawyers, which I started with, I’d call it ‘Real Lawyers Have Blogs.’ A name I owe to my insurance agent who asked me what type of lawyer would have a blog. I told him real lawyers, the good lawyers who take pride in the profession and get their work by virtue of their strong reputation.

I’d write only only about blogs and how lawyers could use blogs to enhance their reputation. Some folks thought I was drunk. What would I write about the next week? After all there wasn’t much being written or talked about when it came to blogs.

Some ‘purist’ bloggers thought I was treading on sacred ground. Blogs were for the sharing of insight and commentary in non-commercial arenas. Others viewed blogs as quasi-diaries logging their activity online or offline.

A number of legal ethics aficionados believed blogs were a step too far. Lawyers would be giving legal advice. Attorney client relationships would be created. Attorney client confidences would be broken through comments.

How could I suggest that good lawyers use blogs to enhance their reputation as a trusted and reliable authority? Worse yet, to grow their practices through blogging?

Within a few weeks a good lawyer (Harvard and Northwestern grad) from Orlando and a large law firm in Pittsburgh called me. They had questions on blogs and asked if I could help them.

Inside another thirty days I am being asked to speak in San Francisco at a conference attended by marketing professionals at large law firms. I am introduced as the national authority on blogs for lawyers (I found that terribly amusing).

Mind you I am I blogging and working off a door laid on filing cabinets under a hardware light in my garage.

When I couldn’t find someone to help me design a blog, set it properly, and help me understand what to do, I started LexBlog. It was through this blog that my reputation grew and LexBlog, with a team of caring and talented people, established itself as a company.

I can’t recommend blogging enough to those of you who are passionate about what you do.

Nothing in my life has enabled me to learn as much and to meet so many fine people. Blogging has become part of who I am and what I do.