Blogging to Success: How Rafal Chmielewski Became the Godfather of the Polish Legal Blogosphere
Wow! There’s another “Godfather of the Legal Blogosphere.”
Rafał Chmielewski shares in a post on LinkedIn that during an appearance on the Ben Prawniniczenia podcast, Szymon Kwiatkowski called Chmielewski “the godfather of the Polish legal blogosphere.”
To which Chmielewski responded, not boasting, but sharing that his blogging did enable him to achieve his dream of going out on his own to start something different.
I am sharing excerpt Chmielewski’s LinkedIn post, liberally, because it’s such a good story – and one that should motivate lawyers everywhere.
Chmielewski:
The truth is that I actually started my first legal blog in 2008 (it’s still on the web today). Sitting behind a desk in a consulting corporation, I dreamed of something that would be different and push me far away from that desk.
At that time, e-business was becoming popular, so I started thinking of something that would help me sell my tax knowledge.
I started a tax blog. Then soon a second one. I wrote two guides in the form of ebooks and it quickly turned out that my income from my simple promotion and sales mechanism is equal to the corporate one. What’s more, I started appearing in the media. What’s more, I became a consultant to the Ombudsman’s office in matters of taxation of foreign income. A simple blog gave me a lot of money and a lot of media hype.
Then I left the corporation and founded web.lex which to this day supports law firms and lawyers in promoting themselves with a legal blog.”
130 law firms and lawyers he’s supporting, the best I can tell. And I am sure that’s not all of them.
Chmielewski’s story should motivate any lawyer looking to achieve their dreams. Blogging can can help a lawyer accomplish want they want, whether in Poland or in the States.
I was honored to get a shout out by Chmielewski.
But back to the beginning… Perhaps my tax blog wasn’t the first law blog ever. At that time, the legal blogosphere was already booming overseas (the perpetrator was Kevin O’Keefe and his LexBlog), and even in Poland one could find individual legal blogs (such as the blog of attorney Mikołaj Barczentewicz ). Nevertheless, my blog was certainly the first one that gave really solid income and media publicity. On this basis, I learned a lot and I was able to show you the results of my work.”
Congrats, Rafal, great story.
And there can be more than one blogfather, though like Chmielewski, I never claimed the title. Others started calling me the blogfather when introducing me.