Blogs within Websites

Good morning from Seattle. Good afternoon to the rest of the country off the west coast. Another so-so night in Seattle last night, there was a fair amount of protest even right out my door with police cars and police on bicycles blocking off the street. A little bit of anxiety and tension that comes with normal life, and I suspect that’s the same for many of you, as we have 40 cities across the country that now are in some stage of having a protest that can become unruly. Here last night there was tear gas and a little bit of unrest.

Regarding legal blogging in 45 chapters, this was the best way to do it. I decided to sit down and say, “Okay, what would people need to know about legal blogging? How can I break this up in snippets, so that they could have it, then how could I take the information and take a video and reduce it to tax and put it into a book?” That’s what I’m doing. I’m not necessarily saying that people are going to be stopping by and listening to Facebook Live, but there will be a recording that will be up on Facebook. We’ll get it up on YouTube, and we’ll share it across LinkedIn; we’ll eventually get it transcribed sooner than later.

Today, I’m talking about your blog’s relationship to your website; I’m going to cover four things. One is the blog being a separate publication apart from your websites, there’s a separate publication too; why have a separate publication apart from your website? The use of the blog at the website would leverage the use of the blogging by a lawyer, if it’s a small firm or lawyers at a larger firm. Be careful to recognize your goal and the advice you’re getting vis-à-vis blog on a website or outside a website. The first thing to recognize is that it’s a separate publication.

Let’s go back to the early days of blogging or legal blogging, in 2003, 2004 when blogging came about. What really made it something was this idea that you could get credibility by publishing, and publishing is an authoritative place. There were websites, no question about it. I had a website for my law firm in ’96 or ’97, but now we’re coming to the point where citizen journalists or people that have insight and commentary, no longer have to go through gatekeepers, they can begin to publish maybe before a lawyer, maybe had to publish at a journal or get something in a bar publication and whatnot. Now you’ve got a printing press at your disposal that gives you that panache.

The first thing that happened was, “What’s the title of my blog?” The blogs were with the names of publications, so when it came time to title the blog, what we did was we work with the firms or with the lawyers who said, “Okay, what’s the topic? And then let’s give it a name”, as if it was a publication, if it was a magazine, if it was a newspaper, it was an insider, anything to indicate that panache, and that’s what it became. You certainly had it say it was published by the lawyer or the law firm, but it was a publication.

Think about something- just use analogies, so you don’t throw common sense out of out the window here. Imagine if a lawyer came in and said they’re writing a book. It just got approved by this major publisher, and it’s going to be on this niche subject. It’s going to relate to a particular type of immigration issue for healthcare institutions, and somebody said, “Whoa, wait a minute. We don’t allow independent publications by our lawyers that could get that type of prestige for the lawyers and that type of notoriety, that type of speaking engagements, that type of potential client interaction, that type of feedback from clients that we really know our stuff. You have to publish that inside of our website. Get the content, put it in the website”. Somebody would say, “Wait a second. That doesn’t make any sense.” Same thing would be if we got the opportunity to publish a publication, and somebody came to a law firm, and they said, “You have some great lawyers publishing on this or working in this particular field; what we would like to do is give you an exclusive. We would like you to publish a publication on this niche and have your lawyers write the insight and commentary, a benefit to people that work in that area whether it’s consumer, small business people, or large corporations, and in-house counsel that are lawyers. Your name will be up there. It will say; this is brought to you by the lawyers such and such”, those types of things.” Would you say, “No, I’m sorry, we can’t do that. We have to publish the content on our website.”? I think the publisher would look at you go, “Really? Why?” “Well, because that’s the philosophy that we have. We do our publishing inside of our website, we don’t do our publishing outside our website.” Blogs or publications don’t lose sight of that for a minute. They’re not a profile of a lawyer, they are a publication, they have a panache. That’s what made them so popular. Just because you’re thinking, “Okay, now that I have something popular, I want to put it over here or I want to get more popularity coming,” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right thing.

I’ll skip to the last point, be careful with your goal. Is your goal to get more traffic to the website? If it is, put all your blogs on your website, because if I can give you more content, and I don’t even care if your lawyers created it, I can get people to create content for you. They email us many times a day, “We’ll write articles for you. We’ll create content for you.” They don’t even need to be lawyers; you make that chock-full of stuff at your website, and you’ll get a lot of people come in there. You can hire people to write in your lawyers’ names, and put it up there. You’ll get a lot of traffic. The idea that all of a sudden because you’re getting more traffic, that somebody there that’s looking for IP issues, in a particular garment industry or pharmaceutical, has now found this and is going to jump over and look at what the estate planning lawyers in your firm do, is the height of folly. When was the last time you went to a medical site, a clinic, or a hospital and you went right to what you need for that healthcare provider? Then you go, “There’s some other stuff in here. I should look and see if I have this situation someday, what they’re doing on that.” That’s the logic that is going on. I’ve heard it.

I’ve heard people say, “If we get more people to come to our website, they’ll bounce around to other things.” They don’t do it. It’d be like the logic of saying that people don’t read the The New York Times sports page, but if we get more people to come to the business page, they’ll probably read the sports page, or if they get more people to come to the obituaries, they’re more likely to read the business page. It doesn’t happen; people go to what’s convenient for them. That type of logic doesn’t work.

The other thing you have to think about as your goal is, how do you guys get work? Now, I use the internet as a small-town trial lawyer in 1996, in 1997. I generated a lot of work through the use of the Internet, by answering questions on AOL and storing them on the website. What did I do? I took my telephone number off the website. Why? Because too many people were coming that way. I could get all the work that I wanted by word of mouth because I was out publishing insight and commentary that was of help to people and building my word of mouth and reputation enough that AOL made me the legal community leader, while Martin Doe was paying four million dollars for a button on the site that wasn’t giving them any more than that, and getting them to come to their website.

A blog is the way that you’re building influence. You’re building relationships, you’re building a reputation. Don’t take that down because somebody is telling you that you should put a blog in a website. Also, ask the person who’s telling you to put that blog in the website, “How long have you blogged? Where have you blogged? Have you built your reputation and authority as a result of blogging? Is your company what it is today because of the people in your company that blog?” Ask them how much they really know about blogging.

They can be great website developers, far, far superior than I am. They can be great search engine optimization people, far, far superior than I am. But I question whether they really know about blogging and what it is, or were they more of a Johnny-come-lately to blogging where it became something that they needed to get into. Maybe they needed to provide their clients, because their clients were going to ask that it be done, and here’s a free opportunity to give blogs away, or at a low cost stick them inside of a website. You got to be smart, you don’t throw common sense out of the window on this.

In addition to the things I’m talking about, there’s also credibility. There’s just credibility to publishing a book, there’s credibility to publishing a magazine, there’s huge credibility to publishing a good blog, there is not huge credibility to publishing a blog that is buried inside a firm website. There’s not. I don’t care what anybody says. You’re putting content in there, you’re trying to push it out. You may even be paying to get it out the door, but there’s not the credibility of an independent publication as if you’re writing a law journal and your name on a particular type of niche, because if you’re writing Texas state and local tax law as the only publication in the state of Texas on that issue, you are known. If that small firm lawyer shared that same content inside his website, he would not have built the reputation and relationships in the book of business that he built as a result. That’s just a fact. You think of it from that standpoint.

Citations. Think of it as a book and a magazine. How many law firm websites get cited by the courts? How many law firm websites have been cited by the United States Supreme Court or the Court of Appeals? I don’t know, I really don’t know. People should send me some, where they can say, “This is where our law firm website gets cited by one of the justices at the United States Supreme Court. Here’s where our law firm website got cited by one of the circuit courts or district courts”.

Blogs get cited, they get cited because they’re legal authority, they’re secondary law. We’ve gone through a stage where I opened up American Law Review late at night and I’m getting pros and cons of an argument, and it was wonderful, but that was the annotations. There was an annotated source that I found in the code or case, it took me out there and now I found it. Do you know what I did? Oftentimes, I copied it at night and handed it to the judge at 7:30 in the morning before a hearing it at nine, said, “Judge, I didn’t have time to brief this, but this is an authority that I’m going to be using this morning when I’m addressing the court.” The judges had no problem in taking that, but that was a secondary authority.

Today, where’s that authority going? It’s going with blogs, law professors, lawyers. Our lawyers are in the LexBlog community, their blogs are getting cited just like a law review. Now, try to bring in a page from a law firm website and in fact, people that have put their content inside a law firm website, probably don’t even monitor what’s going on in other law firm websites publications. You’ve lost all of that. Those lawyers that are participating in the creation of secondary law in the United States are going to build a reputation, and they’re going to build influence; there’s no question about it. They’re going to build it on niche subjects that probably weren’t even being covered before.

What was the chance to record being covered in Delaware with one lawyer with great expertise, monitoring what was going on, until Francis Pileggi started to do so years ago? Then had judges come up and introduce other judges to Francis saying, “Judge, this is Francis Pileggi, he writes the Delaware litigation blog”. He has that type of panache and authority.

Do you think the judge would come up and say, “Judge, this is Francis Pileggi; he has some good information inside of his website.” What would that possibly mean? It would sound silly. Those citations, judicial citations, they’re coming from other blogs because blogs are the secondary law that’s being created, so they’re being cited by other bloggers, lawyers, law professors, law students, you name it. Then those blogs are moving and being cited in different ways than we’ve ever cited content before.

Who knew that citing a blog on the law on a niche point, at something called Facebook developed by Mark Zuckerberg years ago, would be a place that can move insight and commentary that’s real? Not be pushing it at Facebook by the publisher just to get eyeballs on it, but by having somebody share it and offer their insight and commentary on the point, so the flow of information continues to go on an ongoing basis? That’s stunning when you think about it, and that’s going on via Twitter, it’s going on via LinkedIn, those types of citations by other people.

When you put a blog inside of a website, people are not apt to want to cite law firms websites. Why? Because they know it’s being done to promote the firm’s site no matter what you do. You can say it’s here as a body of information for people, but it’s being done to promote the site because all around it, it’s got the navigation about the firm, the press releases and all those things. All great, and all should be there, and websites are very important, but it’s not the place for your primary publishing location because you’re going to lose these other things that I’m talking about.

You can leverage a blog in different types of ways. Let your mind go, “What if I started to send three or four questions through in-house counsel?” We don’t even represent on a particular issue because we’re covering the niche better than anybody in the United States, maybe anybody in the world. You’ll get that; you will get responses from those lawyers because they don’t have the ability to showcase themselves like you do at your firm. They don’t have that bully pulpit to stand on top of to talk to people. You’re going to give it to them with a publication, you’re not going to give it to them by saying, “Can we put that on our website?”

There’s going to be all types of issues then; you’re going to have their boss and their people wondering, “Why are you helping out this law firm? Why are you publishing inside their law firm?” Now,if you’re publishing inside of a widely read magazine, an insider, that type of information, nobody needs to ask anything. If I were to ping Dennis Garcia, the Assistant General Counsel of Microsoft and say, “Hey, Dennis, could you answer a few questions about what you’re seeing in trends during the pandemic for cloud hosting at Microsoft Azure?” I think he would say, “That’d be great.” And I’d set him up for questions and it would go.

Now, I’m not in the business of providing cloud hosting or privacy issues and whatnot, but there’s some law firms that are. They’d be happy to do that and might be happy to write articles for you. A big firm in Minneapolis had a blog called Duets that was relating to IP issues a lot in the garment industry. What they started to do was to come up with a list of the “who’s who” in corporations that they would love to represent that they did not currently, and they ask to be in-house counsel if they would like to write for Duets.

I’m hearing this story with four other lawyers in a room and I’ve been thinking, “Well, this is amazing, tell me more”, and they go, “Well, we emailed so and so, in-house counsel at so and so.” I’m thinking, that’s a household name in apparel. They’re in Boston, we’re in Minneapolis and reached out to him and his response was, “Boy, would I love to write a blog post for you. Can you wait a week until I get back from vacation?” The lawyer of the in-house counsel, this major corporation is saying, “Can you wait a week until I get back?” That’s amazing, you’re going to write a publication.

Now, imagine if the firm that did their work even knew that this was going on below the surface because somebody has a blog publication, while their firm has blog content built inside of a website. Imagine the people in Minneapolis saying, “We’re going to be in Boston, would you have time for lunch?” Well, of course, they would have time for lunch, and they would get together and talk. They would talk about issues relating to what this person’s doing and what this law firm is doing, and all the while this is going on while this other law firm doesn’t have a clue that it’s going on.

You’re leveraging your blog by going out and making connections that you could not make in other ways. You’re also leveraging your blog by sharing and providing insight and commentary out on social media as a gift to people, not as a way to push information out to people. It’s different; it’s totally different when it’s a website and a blog. If you really get down to it and you say, “Where would it say technically that one was advertising and one was providing insight?” Go to the bottom of law firm websites and it will give the advertising disclaimer. “This is advertising in our state.” Nothing wrong with that, that’s great.

Blog; that’s free speech. That’s a lawyer’s ability to share insight and commentary on it. They might put the advertising on it, but it’s free speech, it’s not even commercial speech. Commercial speech is over with the website. Free speech is, “I can publish, I can write a book, I can write a magazine, I can write insight and commentary on the law in order to advance the law that is to help people.” As far as the use of the blog at the website, absolutely use the blog at the website. You definitely want to do that because look at what you’ve done, you have created a publication, you have a publication, you want to leverage that publication at the website.

At the lawyer’s profile you want to say they’re a contributor to the name of the publication. Make that very clear; there’s a panache to that. The contributor too, you have the ability to feed the content into the websites. You can do that via RSS or through an API. I think LexBlog long term is going to be a repository for insight and commentary in the law, and people aren’t going to screw around publicly leaving publishing inside websites software, other software on the firm. They’ll put it in a SAS solution that’s running WordPress. They can put it in, and it could be delivered anywhere, it could be syndicated at various places that they want to have it syndicated to and that we have reached to. One way it could be syndicated is back to the firm’s site.

You can call it in any type of way, whether an API or an RSS, it’s going to come over to the database that’s running the firm. Why not have the most recent three posts from that particular lawyer? That’s nice. Maybe you want to have posts segregated by the practice area. Boom. Those can show up at the bottom of the practice area. Maybe you want to have the leading commentary come across on the front of the website seamlessly so it’s always changing. You’ve got a lot of flexibility in what you want to do.

You may want to create a publication that showcases everything for the firm that’s an aggregation of all the posts. You want to use it. Then over at the blog, you definitely want to use that you’re associated with this firm. That’s panache, that’s credibility. If I’m Skadden and Arps and I’m publishing this blog and it says it’s published by Skadden and Arps, or published by Davis Polk, or it’s published by Sheppard Mullin, or published by Mayer Brown, or it’s published by a leading personal injury lawyer on aircraft cases, that’s a big deal. You will want to have that right there. Or food safety, the Marler firm. Marler Clark is the leading food safety firm in the world, why wouldn’t they say, “This publication”? Food Safety News is very small as far as support; there’s no big banner up there that says it. You want to take credit for the publishing of the blog over here, and in many cases, firms like to have their logo where it says published by.

We’ve talked about the branding already, not to be on an overkill. The first point that I talked about was to separate publication in relationship to the blog, to the website. It’s not inside the website cover. Why? You had credibility issues, you have citations, your ability to leverage it. 

One area that I didn’t cover was work and life. If those lawyers that blog outside the website build notoriety, build a book of business; it’s bringing in many cases, millions of dollars a year.

I’m still waiting for the first website development company to say that they have a particular lawyer that’s generating millions of dollars a year solely from relationships and reputation built on their blog because I haven’t heard of it. It’s dollars. It’s growing your book of business substantially, not a little bit or not knowing how. These tend to be life-changers if you’re doing it right, not just a small bump. The use of the blog at the website, make sure you’re just dealing with the CSS. You’re bringing in its database and displaying the content to whoever you want to. It is easy to do, it is not hard to do, it need not be expensive to do.

If somebody can’t do it, you may not have the right people, but you’re just bringing in syndicated content from another place, which has all of your publications. Anybody can set up those syndication sources so that it can work for you and have it split up wherever you want. Be careful of your goal and your advice. That’s just something really important. I’ve got great friends in the legal business that served law firms and I disagree vehemently with their opinions on blogs inside of websites. I think a lot of it comes from the fact that they’re just not using blogs personally to grow the reputations, they’re not using blogs in a way that they have built authority on behalf of their firm.

If you haven’t touched it, you haven’t felt it, you haven’t tasted, and you haven’t seen what blogging can do for someone, then I don’t know how you have that credibility. It just isn’t there. I’m happy to work with any firm to get them information as fast coming from the blogs and RSS feeds to provide robust insight and commentary across their blogs. If it’s about search or whatever, that’s just a no brainer because you can decide when these fees are living over here, if you want the content to be indexed over here versus indexed on independent blog publications. That’s just a manner of literally flipping switches as far as how you’re going to tag the particular page creation. That’s not an issue.

That’s it on that topic. Too much. The Blog for Good campaign continues. We’re picking up states, we’re picking up steam. States are recognizing the great things that lawyers are providing insight and commentary on, relating to this pandemic, and now you’ve got content relating to the strike going on in this country too. There’s thousands of posts going up a day that are being aggregated and curated, and now they’re being segregated by states. States are jumping on board to showcase the great work that lawyers are doing to help people and to make sure that insight and commentary gets in front of the people that actually need it in this country and that those lawyers that don’t already have a publication can have a publication in their hands for free, no cost.

Everything that LexBlog provides as far as a publication can be provided to those lawyers in participating associations. This is a little bit of an ad, but not an ad from the standpoint of this is all about care; this is all about doing things that we wanted to do as lawyers. We want to care for other people and this is our opportunity to do so. Take a look at Blog for Good; we’re expanding the information on the LexBlog site. Thanks so much, have a good day.