Guidance for the Reluctant Legal Blogger

In the distant past, lawyers used to send printed client updates by mail. Those days are long gone. Then came e-mail, rapidly reaching the saturation point.

You don’t want to clog up your clients’ email in-boxes more than you need to, so push things their way through a brief and punchy blog post.

Blog posts can be published on your firm’s public website and also distributed to a phenomenally big audience through aggregators of online content like Lexology, Mondaq and JD Supra.

Novice blogger? Fear not: here are some tips.

Don’t write about the law; write about how the law affects the people you serve

• Why should the reader care about this information?

A good way to think about blog writing is to consider it a proxy for speaking

•  If you were asked about a particular topic in an elevator, what would you tell the person in 30 seconds?

To be engaging, your blog post should do some or all of the following:

• educate, inspire or entertain
• not be boring – no one wants a tedious and overly technical piece with dozens of footnotes
• have a specific client (or type of client) in mind
• share and initiate a conversation
• introduce why the reader should read the post (online content is judged largely by its headline, especially when readers usually see a list of headlines in their feeds)
• provide quick, practical information on how the content affects the reader
• make the reader want to ask you for further information

Blog-writing is a way of sharing your personality

• Take a look at this piece: http://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/ghostbusters-compensation-and-compliance-99019/. A bit longer than it could be, but saved by its conversational tone, which lets you know who the author is through his writing style
• Here is another example: http://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/do-change-orders-need-to-be-in-writing-53159/

Additional resources to help you:

• Top blog authors on JDSupra (http://www.jdsupra.com/readerschoice/2016/) – learn from people who do this well
• This JDSupra article, How One Simple Question Leads to 3 Months of Solid Writing Ideas for Attorney Bloggers, provides a quick and easy exercise to help you prepare and schedule topics

Next: euphemisms

–Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)