University of Pacific McGeorge School of Law Kicks Off Legal Blogging Workshop for Law Students

The University of Pacific McGeorge School of Law kicked off a Blogging Workshop for law students last week.

Students will leave with a basic understanding of how legal blogging during law school can enhance their reputation and build relationships so as to can gain employment in an area in which they have an interest.

I have the honor of leading the workshop along side Molly Stafford, Assistant Dean, Career Development & External Relations.

I like McGeorge’s approach for teaching legal blogging to its students. We needn’t create a law school class, nor do we need to create the perfect curriculum or method for teaching blogging.

Legal blogging is new for law schools. Sure, there are pockets of programs on legal blogging at law schools. But they’re few, hit and miss and they come and go.

Starting small, simple and not setting the bar too high is the right fit. One to build momentum – McGeorge sees legal blogging as growing – and to determine the best way to teach legal blogging at the law school.

We broke our three week workshop, with three classes and some homework, into three sections.

• An introduction to legal blogging. What legal blogging is? What’s the benefit for law students? What’s a good law blog? How to blog in a strategic and effective fashion? How to measure success.
• Actual publishing of a blog. Each of the eight students received their own staged blog on the LexBlog platform. Students will publish a blog post in a niche for wich they have a passion based on what they learned in the first session and read in shared materials. We’ll review and discuss the blog posts in our next class.
• Social media. We’ll review and discuss the use of social media used in conjunction with legal blogging – LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

McGeorge is a leader on the legal blogging front, being the first law school in the country to aggregate and curate the legal blogs of its professors and alumni into a digital publication.

Its McGeorge Law Today, shines a light on the legal blogging of its alumni, from solos to lawyers in multinational law firms.

Personally, I am benefitting from Molly Stafford’s approach to teaching legal blogging.

I may be a lawyer and respected on the subject of legal blogging, but teaching is an art – especially at the law school level with smart and highly motivated students.

I am learning how to teach ”legal blogging” in a digestible, effective and inspiring fashhion.

I hope I can continue teaching legal blogging at McGeorge and, perhaps, other law schools which have similar foresight as to the benefit of legal blogging for law students.

As way of confession – a proud one – I am a graduate of McGeorge and as a result passed the California Bar and landed immediate employment as a lawyer in Ireland and when I returned, in Wisconsin.