GeekLawyer’s Blog

Geeklawyer is pleased by the recent modest growth of UK law blogs - we have a long long way to go before we reach the same relative numbers as in the US. But there is something of a contradiction here: while welcoming more bloggers Geeklawyer is concerned …

He’s sympathetic to free markets to a point and he welcomes, at an abstract level, competition even while recognising, on the other hand, that it means he has to work harder to keep readers. He’d like to pretend he blogs just for personal release but there is a tiny tiny kernel of ego here: the blog is popular and he wish it to remain so, and while that is not even a large part of why he does it it’s a factor.

More of a factor is the truly massive income derived from Google small ads. Blimey if you think being a lawyer pays well trying having Google adverts: Google hires an elite security team to deliver Geeklawyer’s monthly Adsense revenues (he demands cash since he doesn’t feel inclined to indirectly assist HM treasury in financing any more of The Dear Leader’s illegal wars).

For law firms there is there is the marketing element of blogging; blogs assist in garnering a reputation and therefore business: some disagree and say “Real lawyers don’t blog” but such views are poorly thought through and weakly analysed. It’s true a blog will not, of itself, get business since a blog, when used in this fashion, is merely a PR tool. What is true is that the blog can demonstrate two things: expertise and personality. We do business with people we know and we trust, and if we like them so much the better. Nothing is as able as the blog in demonstrating these qualities; no amount of briefing papers, or references to ones last appearance in the House of Lords, or one’s glowing entry in the Legal 500. My own favourite for a firm blog done in an exemplary fashion is Freeth Cartwrights Impact blog this is the template of how to do it: informative, engaging while remaining professional, enthusiastic and expert (examples exist of how not to do it).

Most people don’t meet lawyers except in times of stress, and when they do the lawyer is either adding to it or making it worse: that is, they are acting as tormentor or, if friendly, relieving them of professional fees. But we are not, lawyer jokes aside for a moment, sharks: the blog demonstrates the loving caring warmth we all, in our calling, know that we have for our fellow man. Why, I met a partner in a City firm the other day who remembered once enjoying Christmas as a child (though I was unconvinced he’d ever been a child); so you see, we are all human and not just billable hours machines, we are capable of demonstrating fine feelings. It is this redeeming feature that may turn the casual blog browser into an enquirer and thence into a customer and thence into a cash cow.

Geeklawyer will now resume learning to hack Objective-C on his Mac OSx. Don’t worry you dear lawyer, you don’t have to, it’s a geek thing: ‘Real Lawyers Don’t Hack’.