I’ve Started a Book on Legal Blogging—Using My Blog as the Corpus

Somewhere over South Dakota tonight, flying home from New York, I started writing a book. It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time—a book on blogging for lawyers.

I never knew where to start. I knew what needed to be covered—roughly 45 chapters, give or take. Gathering, organizing, and building it into something cohesive always felt just out of reach. Heck, I’m just a normal guy crazy about blogs, not an author.

I arrived at 45 chapters after law firms asked if I had a book for their lawyers — they wanted one place that covered all the stuff I talked about in teaching and conversations with them. On the side, I made a list of what I’d have to cover and included the list in a blog post—Legal Blogging Book-Forty Five (or so) Chapters Long.

On Jill’s death and sitting in my condo during the Pandemic, I started to record one chapter a day on Facebook Live. Even with my lab, Louis’ encouragement, I couldn’t even complete the 45 by just talking.

Then, yesterday when someone told me I needed someone to help me, it hit me. I already wrote the book—I just hadn’t pulled it all together.

My blog, Real Lawyers Have Blogs, is approaching 10,000 posts. It’s the most comprehensive, passionate, and sustained body of writing on legal blogging anywhere.

No one has written more on the subject—certainly not with the same conviction, and certainly not with the same belief in what blogging can do for lawyers, and more importantly, for the people they serve.

Who else would be crazy enough to do so?

So here’s the plan:

I’m using my blog as the corpus—a large language model of sorts, built from 20 years of experience—reading, blogging, teaching—on the subject. A few fights along the way when others diminished the value of online authenticity and engagement.

Plus there’s all I’ve learned from bloggers inside and outside the law. Most everything I learned was about reading what others wrote, sharing it, and providing my take. After all, you don’t know what you know until you blog it.

Post by post, I’ll draw from this corpus and pen a book.

AI is helping researchers unlock cancer treatments by sifting through massive volumes of data. Why can’t it help shape something much simpler but meaningful for me—a book on blogging, drawn from a lifetime of trying to help lawyers share what they know and be seen for who they are?

I’ll be writing this chapter by chapter, and I’ll share drafts here on my blog along the way—just the like the Red Couch Blog did two decades ago.

It’s not just about writing a book. It’s about staying true to a mission that’s guided me from day one: connecting lawyers with people, for good—get insight out of the heads of caring and experienced lawyers and memorialize it to help people while the lawyers make a name for themselves.

This book is for the lawyers who still believe. And for those who’ve already shown what’s possible when you blog not to market, but to make a difference—in the lives of others and your own.