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90% of Legal Blogs Produced By Small Law Firms May Be Spam

It’s become difficult, or impossible, to find quality legal blogs published by small law firms in this country.

LexBlog’s library sciences intern, working on the Open Legal Blog Archive, backed by LexBlog, estimates over 75%, perhaps even 90%, of the blogs from small firms are spam. This sample from a survey nearing 20% of the country.

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Most are written on behalf of the law firm, by a marketing company or agency. The blogs are not written by lawyers in the firm.

A spam blog is used to game search engines to achieve higher rankings and to link to affiliated websites owned by the law firm.

The term spam blog or “splog” was popularized in 2005 by Mark Cuban.

Rather than blogs personally delivering insight and information, the blog was trying to influence search indexes and others by trying to use every relevant term in the dictionary.

The lawyers having someone else publish their blogs don’t care that doing so is unethical under any state’s rules of professional conduct.

In the solicition of new clients (advertising), a lawyer cannot do anything that is false or misleading.

Saying you wrote something you did not is clearly misleading advertising.

My guess is most lawyers think a blog is something you buy from a legal marketing company that goes on your website to get SEO and web traffic.

These lawyers have no idea what legal blogging is, nor does their marketing company.

Who cares about ethics or taste. “Every lawyer is doing it.”

Lawyers have an awful reputation with average Americans.

This form of blogging is only making it worse.

The Internet and blogging represents a wonderful opportunity for lawyers to connect with people in a real and intimate way.

For lawyers to build a reputation and book of business, while at same time helping people.

When I started LexBlog almost twenty years ago I thought there was no way lawyers could screw up this opportunity to connect with people while building a real reputation.

Boy, was I wrong.

It’s sad.