Are we seeing a resurgence in legal blogging?

Are we seeing a resurgence in law blogs?

Something’s going on. Whether it’s more lawyers seeing the power of blogs, law blogs taking their place alongside traditional legal publishing (or replacing it), the ease of blog publishing today or me just seeing more good law blogs and bloggers, I don’t know.

I was speaking with a CMO of a 150 lawyer firm this morning whose firm has three blogs who is looking to upgrade those blogs and add more legal blogs. The non-blogging lawyers saw the amount of client and prospective client engagement generated by the existing blogs and now want to get started with blogs of their own.

Later on I received a message from a larger firm that has not traditionally blogged that they wanted to talk blogging, particularly with regard to a tight niche in technology.

My colleague, friend and LexBlog’s editor-in-chief and publisher, Bob Ambrogi says that he can feel new energy in legal blogging since he joined LexBlog at the beginning of the year and LexBlog began to aggregate and curate legal blogs on LexBlog.

Limited data would certainly suggest a rise. Over 17,700 legal professionals are blogging on our publishing platform, alone. That number continues to rise.

I’m talking of real law blogs. Blogs authored and written by caring, experienced and passionate lawyers, not blogs penned by folks other than the lawyer for the purpose of web traffic. Let alone the ethical issues those blogs raise, the blogs are little more than a billboard alongside I-95. An advertisement.

This country has thousands and thousands of lawyers with tremendous niche expertise. They represent victims of domestic abuse in getting a restraining order, work on funding deals for hundreds of millions of dollars, advise individuals on the formation of small businesses in Midwestern towns and appear in front of government of county, state and federal agencies on all sorts of matters.

These lawyers can offer one hundred times the practical insight as reporters with traditional legal news publications who can only quote authorities like these lawyers.

With the democratization of publishing, via blogs, these lawyers, in increasing numbers, are taking to the press – their own – to advance the law and their careers.

As we add tools to mine data from LexBlog’s aggegation and syndication platform, we’ll have better data to support the notion of a legal blogging surge. But for now, I’ll go with what Bob says, there’s a new energy in legal blogging.