Legal Blogging Community, What’s Entailed?

I recently blogged about a legal blogging community.

Much I what I shared was viewed readers as a yearning for the old days of legal blogging when we followed each other’s blogs and got to know each other in a real and meaningful. Most folks responded that getting back to that sort of community may not be possible.

That’s okay, the world has changed in the last fifteen years, especially on the Internet, where fifteen years is the equivalent of about fifty years offline. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even the term, “social media” are all new.

There’s no reason though that we cannot have a community that empowers and inspires legal bloggers, nationally and world-wide.

A place where legal bloggers and wannabe bloggers can find bloggers, their publications, and and relevant legal/social commentary and insight. A place where bloggers can find bloggers and publishing to follow and take their engagement even beyond blogs to the engagement mediums they use – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. And a place that connects lawyers with people.

Here’s a crack at what LexBlog could do to make that community a reality.

• Take blogging to a higher level. Little question that blogging is one of the best, if not the best way, for a lawyer to build their reputation and market themselves. The mission of a community would be for something greater than ourselves – to connect lawyers with people, for good. Lawyers are irrelevant to 85% of people. It’s not price, it’s trust and not having a clue what lawyers do. Lawyers, coast to coast, blogging on issues relevant to consumers, small business people, corporations and other organizations will get lawyers out where people are, on the net and out in a real and authentic way.
• Education and support of bloggers. There is more misinformation about what blogging is and how to blog than there is good information today. A community run by LexBlog will provide education and support to bloggers through various mediums.
• In addition to an online community displayed through a publication, described below, and social media, a community will have offline events whether they be meetups by locale, subject or larger conferences.
• For bloggers and wannabe bloggers lacking a strong and effective blogging platform, LexBlog will provide them with the legal industry’s leading blog publishing platform. For lawyers on a budget, LexBlog can make its platform available at prices the equivalent of WordPress.com. For law schools and non-profit’s the platform is free.
• A powerful publication covering countless subjects in the law curating the best in legal blog publishing from lawyers in the States, and then overseas. Each piece being penned by people in the know – experienced and caring legal professionals. You are seeing the early stages of that publication at LexBlog.com being run by Melissa Lin, Bob Ambrogi and others on our publishing team.
• Publication would be the visual equivalent of the New Yorker, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic or The Athletic. Bloggers need to look at their publishing surrounded by the publishing of a who’s who of legal professionals, worldwide, in an eloquent and beautiful presentation. Enough so that they’re holding up their iPhone to their spouse, colleagues and who have you and saying “look at this, isn’t this incredible, look where I’m published and look at how great it looks.” And why not? As a small town lawyer for almost twenty years, if I could publish on my own publication and have it shown to the world in something like that, I’d be pretty pumped.
• At all times this publication recognizes it’s all about the lawyers and the people they serve. The publication is not indexing the blog posts nor is its goal to get traffic, its purpose is to shine a light on bloggers, their work and the good things they are doing.
• Publication is run on outstanding technology, that’s constantly being updated at its core and with new features added.
• Dynamic directory of legal bloggers by which users can find bloggers by topics, state, metro, subject, law school, associations (bars etc), organizations and law firms.
• Profiles of bloggers, displaying a New Yorker style byline, backgrounder, contact information and social media handles.
• Profiles of blog publications and the organizations publishing such publications.
• Extending the curated publishing to bar association, law school, law firm and organization magazines ala the Illinois Lawyer Now shining a light on member bloggers and their publishing – and getting the bloggers insight to more readers.
• Recognizing the better bloggers by locale, topics, firms, associations and organizations.
• Recruit of existing credible legal bloggers and blogs into the community.
• Identifying gaps not being covered by blogs and recruit bloggers. For example, states may have six or seven good sized cities (that’s relative by state) for which core areas of the law are not covered by legitimate blogs. Subjects such as family law, workers compensation, real estate, employment law, criminal law, estate planning, elder law, personal injury, immigration, disability and social security come to mind. There are plenty of niches within those as well. But if we’re going to connect lawyers with people by lawyers personally communicating in a real and authentic way, the community needs to covert core areas of the law in key metro areas.  There are also any number of areas of law and industry not being covered by lawyers representing corporate and government clients.

I’m sure there are twenty-five other things LexBlog could do to help create and foster a legal blogging community. My list are my quick thoughts. I’d welcome hearing your ideas and getting your feedback.

LexBlog was founded to help lawyers build relationships and a profile by connecting with people in a real and meaningful way. A global legal blogging community feels right on point, while making a far greater impact.