BLOGGING is to public relations what e-mails are to letters and is one of the most important technological innovations for law firms. So says Andy Haven, a US legal marketing manager, who gives warning: “If your firm doesn’t have at least one lawyer who is blogging, you look like a firm who, in 1996, didn’t have a website yet.”

Blogs (or blawgs in the legal context) are increasingly touted as potential goldmines, but are law firms using blogs to their full potential and just how useful are they in practice? There are more than 500 blawgs on the internet, written by lawyers, students and academics on a wide variety of topics. The first UK barrister to blog is “geeklawyer”, specialising in intellectual property, technology and media issues. And some are anonymous — such as the elusive “blawger of Ealing”, a metropolitan magistrate.

Legal experts focus their blawgs on their area of expertise but lawyers in Britain have been slow to recognise their potential, and if they don’t jump on the blogging bandwagon soon, they will lose out to other experts who get in first.

Nan Joeston, a San Francisco intellectual property expert, has a well-established blawg on intellectual property issues. “Any potential new client always checks out our website first and will see our blog,” she says. “Having a blog conveys an impression that we are not a stuffy, old-style firm but are aware of and comfortable with new ways to communicate with a broad audience.”

Clifford Chance is exploring the opportunities of blogging. A spokesman says: “Our aims for a blog would be to enable us to interact with our stakeholders on a personal level; to collect feedback on our services and products; and provide value in terms of useful content in the form of information, help, discussion and ideas.”

But there are doubts as to the use of blawgs for securing new business. Martin Davies, a legal marketing consultant and curator of www.lawontheweb.co.uk, says: “(Blawgs) are not desperately interesting to clients. The only way I can see that a blog would have a significant marketing impact would be if it were aimed at one particular market sector.”

Charles Christian, a legal technology expert, goes further: “Any firm that builds a marketing strategy on blogs is deluding itself.” He adds that if law firms really want to attract clients, they would be better off approaching potential clients direct to find out what they really want in terms of legal services.

Mills & Reeve, the national firm, has established the successful specialist NakedLaw blawg about technical law issues. Peter Wainman, of Mills & Reeve, says people blog for many reasons, ranging from marketing their services to self-expression, and he says blawgers are communicating with potential clients. He says: “You might be lucky and get a new client overnight because you write something that is relevant to that client’s business, but it is more likely that the blog will have a medium to long-term prospect of bringing in new business by raising the profile of a firm and demonstrating its experience, particularly in niche areas. Blog readers tend to hate blogs that are thinly disguised attempts to drum up new work.”

He adds: “We didn’t expect a flood of new business to come our way when we started NakedLaw — but some of our clients do read the blog, and it is something we direct potential clients towards as a showcase of the sorts of fields in which our technology team demonstrates expertise.”

With their visibility on the internet, blawgs allow lawyers to communicate directly to potential clients and a crucial factor is the part played by rankings in internet search results. Google, for example, tends to rank well-connected blogs with many links to other sites higher than conventional websites; search engines rank blogs highly because of their high text content and, crucially, because they are often updated. Wainman says: “The search engines will bring people to your blog, but people will keep coming back only if they regularly like what they read.”

Potential bloggers should note that as yet there are no guidelines in using blogs as a marketing tool but the Law Society is seeking the profession’s views as to whether or not it would find detailed guidance on the topic helpful. Bloggers are good at getting into trouble for what they write and the courts have yet to apply the law to bloggers. In the meantime, legal bloggers should be cautious; they, of all bloggers, should at least know the law.

www.nakedlaw.co.uk

www.lawontheweb.co.uk

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