Announcing new legal blogs

There ought to be a place announcing new legal blogs — and it makes all the sense in the world that it be LexBlog.

I am not talking about blogs thrown up on websites as a means of improving SEO, often with ghostwritten content. 

I am referring to blogs written in a real and authentic way by someone with an interest in a subject and/or locale. Someone using their blog to learn, to share their insight with others, to report on the unreported, to network, to advance the law and, at the day, to grow their influence.

You don’t need to worry about SEO and getting found if you blog this way. You’ll get found on search and in 85 other ways that are equally as important.

What would be announced?

• Name of the blog
• What the blog covers
• Who publishes the blog
• Why the blogger is publishing the blog – what’s their angle or interest 
• Name of their organization, ie, law school, law firm, association, company 

Why announce legal blogs?

• Shot in the arm to the new blogger. When you start a blog you are blogging to an audience of one. A call out from a place like LexBlog with likely follow on welcomes and congrats from others that saw the announcement would be good inspiration.
• Help build our worldwide community of legal bloggers. The community is loose knit now, to say the least. Announcing new bloggers and blogs would foster relationships based on common interests and locales and grow the community and “sub-communities” of which LexBlog acts as a hub.
• Discovery of new blogs for witch to subscribe. Announcing new bloggers each week would be widely followed by legal bloggers, worldwide, as well as other legal professionals. They would subscribe to new blogs of interest via RSS and email updates. 
• Get more legal professionals blogging. Blogging is not hard and it’s certainly not what many people think it is. Seeing other legal professionals starting to blog will inspire others to start – and even give “wannabe” bloggers people to call and ask, “what’s this all about? How did you get started?”
• Shows the topics and locales being covered. That’ll inspire legal professionals to see openings for them. 

How do we get this done? It shouldn’t be hard, but there are some hurdles. Though Harvard Innovation Lab’s Caselaw Access Project which digitized 40 million pages of case law makes any hurdles we have seem trivial.

We need to know of the new blogs. The onus is on us at LexBlog first, not the new bloggers.

LexBlog needs to feel and actually be the center of the universe for all legal blogs – the platform of record for indexing and syndicating all legal blog content, if you will.

We’ve starting work on this by opening LexBlog’s legal news and commentary platform to all legal blogs, no matter whether they are running on our publishing solution or not.

We now need to go get all existing legitimate law blogs on the platform. Firm by firm, lawyer by lawyer and blog by blog. Passion and persistence on our part.

We need to start sharing on a regular basis the new legal blogs on LexBlog. They may not be new bloggers, but it’ll help existing legal bloggers recognize LexBlog’s stature and motivate them to register their blog with LexBlog.

And, of course we need to start energizing LexBlog, as a news and commentary site, by harnessing the passion, ideas and drive of  journalists.

It wasn’t that long ago — okay, 14 years, — when I singled out new blogs. Bob Ambrogi and Carolyn Elefant did the same with a law blog round for ALM and the ABA Journal Journal did their part by indexing legal blogs.

But legal blogging has come of age. 17,000 legal professionals are publishing on the LexBlog platform alone, tens of thousands elsewhere, and 4,500 legal blogs in the States alone.

Time to start bringing this community of legal bloggers together and doing something as polite as announcing new legal bloggers.