Kevin: This is Kevin O’Keefe for real lawyers have blogs of all things and who am I talking with?
Tanya: Tanya Forsheit the chair of the Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz privacy and data security group.
Kevin: I first talked to you when you called one evening and said, this is Tanya Forsheit from Proskauer and I’m going to do a privacy blog. How did that come about in your mind?
Tanya: It was a really long time ago, I think that was in 2006 or Like that and I was a like a senior associate and I was trying to develop privacy practices at a time when privacy was really not so well-known. As a legal practice, we had breach notification laws and in California, we had some other laws, you know, Cal APA and things like that, but wasn’t that well known. I had an idea, as a senior associate at a large law firm. The idea was, how do I make people aware of my expertise and my knowledge and that I’m doing this and blogging was around already for sure.
There were some large law firms that already had blogs, they were many, there are few and I had threw that doing some research had discovered your company that was helping law firms, new blog specifically. The idea had first come from even like a business development class, I was doing that maybe blogging was a good idea. I thought well, let’s give it a shot, let me get some information. The Firm was open to me finding out what would be involved and then we had to make the case for it, but yes, that was how it happened.
Kevin: When you saw the privacy isn’t, you saw it as an opportunity?
Tanya: I did, I mean certainly no one could have predicted what has happened because at that time remember there wasn’t even really Facebook. Facebook was still like a Harvard thing, and social media hadn’t exploded the way that it eventually did and we hadn’t had many of the large breaches that have attracted attention from the c-suite, boards and created the I mean the public consciousness of this has changed completely. Then over the last few years with things like the Edward Snowden revelations and Facebook Cambridge analytical, everything has changed.
I picked well, but it wasn’t known and there was a lot of skepticism. There was a lot of skepticism in the legal community about privacy as an illegal practice for sure. So this was a way to get more visibility.
Kevin: One of the things I tell lawyers now is rather than just say, okay I’m in this practice group, we’re struggling and I’ve got huge competition so I’ll start a blog and everything will be better in my life, but it doesn’t really work out that way. You better off to sit back and say where might the opportunity to be in certain niches.
Tanya: To be honest with you the big thing that was even more important came not long after I started the process our blog I decided to go out on my own and start my own firm called info log, which is still around as well. Blogging that started in 2009, blogging was at the absolute core and heart of what we were doing in launching that firm because that was how we were putting out our knowledge base about lots of things, privacy issues, data security, cloud computing which was really big and growing at the time, we did a whole series of blog posts on cloud computing that got huge response. I mean even to this day, I think some of those 10-year-old blog posts are still around.
Kevin: Who is the driving force and saying, okay we’re going to blog, and we’re going to build notoriety through blogging.
Tanya: In that situation and it was both myself and Dave Nevada who was one of my co-founding partners who’s now it Coolie, he was blogger even before we started the firm he had his own blog and was doing a lot better.
Kevin: What I remember about that site was it led with the content. So it wasn’t like, okay here’s everything our firm does, here’s your pictures of who we are, usually went to school you led your insight and commentary.
Tanya: At that time we wanted the blog to be the website and obviously over time they’re different philosophies about how that works. Doesn’t work I think today things are different to some extent but at the time it worked well because that was how people got to know us and I still run into lawyers and other people these days who will know me through that and its need that we were able to develop a brand. I mean really a brand in a reputation through that.
Kevin: What have you learned from blogging and maybe even better question, what has it done for you? I mean you just said brand, if you look back on it over the years, going back a while.
Tanya: I’ve done it each law firm I’ve been, I did it Proskauer, it info Law Group did a bigger Hostetler when I was there and we’re doing it here now, although and I’ve already said big caveat for those are going to go to our blog which is focused on the data, we don’t blog as often as we like to but that’s because we’re so busy.
Kevin: You’re not the only one it has happened to, you are at work.
Tanya: With the California consumer privacy act. The biggest thing it’s done for me is you build your brand and my brand is built not just associated with the firm’s I’ve been with but for me, which is surprising and interesting, but I’ve become known individually through it as well because I’ve been willing to go out and write things that are not necessarily always the like lawyer Lee, like I’m writing a sort of a scholarly article or I’m just writing like a little blurb. It’s something in between where I really am sharing some knowledge, I’m not giving legal advice but I’m sharing some knowledge that is unique to my perspective and based on my experience within the industry et cetera.
That’s had huge returns over time. It’s not just individual it, it’s rarely just like I wrote this article and then somebody thought and called up, that happens sometimes but more often it’s the collective of somebody is looking for personally. particular expertise, goes online does they’re searching and all of that comes up all those old blog posts, word of mouth et cetera it’s just adds to that reputational and so one of the reasons why I’m so busy today, fast forward from 2006 to 2019.
Kevin: Jeff Noah is now at littler blogs on FMLA said the same thing elevated him to a trusted advisor status and it took time, it wasn’t like it happened, somebody clicked a button and said I saw your posting I’m calling you up and he also said what you said to he used the term helping people you shared some knowledge that people could find of help. When you were blogging, Proskauer and then coming on with your for Law Group, when you were hitting your stride logging how much time we were spending on it?
Tanya: It really varied, I’m sure there were Point in time when I was spending a tremendous amount time, but usually what would happen because think back to the times when there was a really good post and usually what would happen was you just sort of get inspired by something like you would with any writing like and I like to write I mean that’s another thing is like if you don’t like to write, you’re probably not going to like blogging but if you like to write that will happen to me, I’ll get inspired by something and want to write about it and so it’s just sitting down and putting pen to paper and then those would just flow so sometimes it would take couple of hours sometimes it might take longer.
There wasn’t just me, that was my colleagues and I’ve had that experience even here where something has happened, a good example I can give you here my partner Jeremy Goldman who’s a litigator here, but he does some privacy stuff as well and he does kids privacy Cava. I don’t know two years ago the show Silicon Valley had an episode about Kapa and it was actually much more legal focus than in it’s hilarious. It’s a hilarious episode of the show so Jeremy was inspired by that and he sat down that night, I think he did it overnight and wrote a post about the Silicon Valley episode of about Kapa and what was accurate what was it?
That happened so you spent a couple of hours and you crank out something really good, I don’t think that good blogging should take more than a couple of hours at most to have something solid. You don’t want it to be super long and crazy, I mean occasionally, it’s nice to have a really meaty post and we used to talk about that info Law Group. We would do short ones and then we do something really longer but no, I mean you could do something in an hour if you really wanted to so an hour or two a week is probably something ideal, I think for maybe more for people who are really confident.
Kevin: Think about what that accomplishes of building a brand. I was talking with Amy, SCOTUS blog on Monday when you realize hundred people have contributed to that blog this year. She’s gone at the Supreme Court in the morning before we met, that’s a totally different deal.
Tanya: That’s actually one of the ones that were like, I mean, I still think of that like one of the very best right, there’s the SCOTUS blog. There’s like air Goldman’s technology marketing Loblaws and those people I mean those are the ones who are really at the top of their game and I’ve done like guest post for Eric also like they did that’s the other nice thing now, although I should do more of my own blog but yes.
Kevin: Eric moves from Marquette to Santa Clara on the back of that blog because I met him that way.
Tanya: He has one of the very best I mean, there’s no question and people use it as a resource, I mean lots of lawyers.
Kevin: You’ve mentioned some things already, but if you were talking to a lawyer that was on the fence about starting a blog with now starting a blog you’re talking about the time, you’re talking about writing. Although I started a blog because I was in a non-compete and I wanted to learn to write better. After having practiced law for 20 years, I thought I could write like a person and this would be a good way to practice that we can even put that under here. So I concluded that you can you can write bad but for only so long after your blog, but what other advice would you give somebody that they were on the fence about thinking about doing it?
Tanya: You do need to be committed to it. It’s problematic if you’re going to do blog and you’re never going to do it and I continued to struggle without to this day. You have to be committed they’re going to keep doing it and keep blogging but if you’re on the fence, if you feel like you have something to say and to add to a conversation about a particular legal topic that’s unique, especially you’re trying to establish yourself in a niche space, it’s a really good way to do that because it does raise that visibility through not a whole lot of effort especially if you like to write and you can write about things that you’re already working on not obviously they were privileged that you can’t get the cleanser.
You can write about topics that you’re working on or something that you might otherwise need to do. There is such a thing as repurposing which doesn’t mean that you should write something and then post it everywhere it means, maybe you’re doing a presentation and that something goes hand-in-hand with that and it all comes together. Then once you have all this content you really can use that in other context you can do presentations, you can use it in your own client work.
Kevin: What about the importance of a niche?
Tanya: Is important, because if you’re just writing about the same things that everybody is writing about then it doesn’t matter and so was one of the reasons why ours was successful early on both prosperity of the letter-writing about stuff that wasn’t being covered as much at the time. I mean now I don’t know how many privacy blogs security are out there, here are many.
Kevin: Proskauer got busy. Everybody else got busy blogging.
Tanya: Everybody has a privacy blog. If you’re writing not just topics that are unique, but if you’re bringing a different perspective to it, especially if you’re willing to be not so weirdly and by that I don’t mean like say things that wouldn’t be appropriate for a lawyer to say what I mean is don’t talk about it the way any other lawyer would talk about it, be yourself, have your own voice. When people talk about both blogging and social media. This is true not just in legal if you don’t have your own unique voice, you’re going to be boring and it comes off as advertising or comes off as just a news flash that everyone’s already seen before or headline. You have to have a sense of humor, you have to bring something unique to it that’s going to draw people.
Kevin: How did you figure this all out? Maybe it was just over the years by the seat of your pasts because you could go out and teach a course now?
Tanya: I figured it out because I had too, I really wanted to have a successful practice and I had come out of being a general commercial litigator which I enjoyed I really but I didn’t see an ability to turn that into the tice of my own that was unique to me and I was lucky to be in a place where privacy was an option and there were other people I was practicing with, I was lucky that the blog had also come out I should say. Proskauer had come out of a book, a treatise there we had done a Proskauer on privacy treatise through PLI that Chris Wolfe who at the time was Proskauer then went on to Hogan had done and so the blog was sort of a jumping-off point from that.
It could be a continuation because you can only update so often and then you’ve got this book that paper has to be inserted. Blog you can keep much more current and you can have topics that are much more timely.
Kevin: Not pocket parts anymore.
Tanya: There still are.
Kevin: How’d you get the other people in Proskauer? It sounds you had this idea, the firm says, okay you can explore it but other people jumped in that Proskauer, how did that all come about because usually you’re not going to have the associate give the free range to do that and then bring everybody else in?
Tanya: For one thing I was pretty senior even though I was an associate and I was to the firm’s credit. I was somebody who they treated very well and they had a lot of regard for and so they gave me– I certainly had to prove that this was something worthwhile but then once we did that there were a group of Associates and we didn’t really– I mean we had a privacy group of there weren’t that many people who were really technically privacy there were litigators, they were corporate people and so all of us we’re just wanting to be involved because you get your name out there at that time that was very appealing. As a way for a more junior person to become known as associated with something and Google yourself and your name show up.
Kevin: It’s amazing.
Tanya: You get news alerts about stuff that in especially the other thing that happens is that journalists, as you know, pick up on the stuff. You get journalists who will want to take your content and do something with you. You also get people who call you for interviews about you become sort of a quoted expert, so if you’re an associate that’s an opportunity that it’s different from, I’m just going to write this brief and someone else going to take credit for it and have their name on it. One of the very deliberate decisions we made at Proskauer and then also at the other firms I’ve been at is the blog posts are in the name of the person. Some firms have decided to just say, by Proskauer or by Frank Ricard whatever which is fine is another way to do it.
Kevin: Doesn’t work very well.
Tanya: I’m not going to judge but when we started each of these we were blogging in our own name and as I’ve left some firms in the interest full disclosure sometimes and this is not surprising. I don’t blame anybody because those are from blogs so sometimes my name has become a firm name, which is fine. I’m still very proud of that content, I still consider it very much at that I created and I am very happy about that but that’s how you got people involved. I mean, of course when people are busy it’s very hard to get people to continue that momentum. I have found even here today even when were super busy if there’s an associated really wants to write about a particular topic. You cannot stop that person, it doesn’t matter how much they have to do billable work. They will find a way to find way to do the middle of the night because they want to get that out and they want to make that statement.
Kevin: I mean it’s still, after all these years it still works.
Tanya: It does, it’s fascinating.
Kevin: Publishing always worked, if we probably look back long before we were lawyers, 150 years before what did lawyers do, they probably spoke, they were interviewed they wrote absolutely and we’re just doing it digitally today.
Tanya: Well, the thing that both I love it and it drives me crazy is when I’m sitting in a meeting it could be here. It could be out in the bar association world or something and somebody goes he are going to blog, like no one has ever thought of this before, blogging and it’s like yes blogging of course but you’re it’s just as effective in just as compelling now, and that’s why people are still like you know light bulb.
Kevin: You need to have an individual that becomes the driving force for a little bit of energy because sometimes firms will say we have to have a blog and if I ask them what the goal is the goal is to have a blog that’s really not a good enough goal, what’s going to measure success? Well, we’ll have a blog and then it tends to die out because nobody’s passionate about it. I still think passion is real important, there must have been some passion that you had for privacy law back then and I still do.
Tanya: For sure still do, I think then I was intrigued by it and I wondered what the possibilities were. It had some interesting relationships to other things I’d done and enjoyed on the intellectual-property side, even on the traditional property side and so I wouldn’t have imagined that it would have been as high profile of a practice as it turned out to be which is a surprising thing.
Kevin: You must have some moments when all of sudden this stuff started breaking you go holy cow.
Tanya: Absolutely, it’s and it’s been fun to watch the rest of the world catch up and then to also have people who consider themselves to be Old Timers in the Privacy world who have only been doing it for say five years there. Our people believe it or not and I’m not even the most senior of them by a long shot. There are people who’ve been doing privacy now for maybe even 20 years, meaningfully. A lot of them in DC where it was something that started a little earlier and those are the real pioneers but I mean blogging is something that allowed me and many others to have a voice.
Kevin: Well you mean I think at this point I’m your looked at this one, but one of the leading lawyers yet in the country.
Tanya: Shockingly, but apparently, yes, and since California has decided to stick it’s neck out there and wave the charge, it’s been an even more strange journey and experience. Yes. This is all one of those reasons. Certainly, my name would not have been known without blogging.
Kevin: Yes, because I’m seeing here today, we’re sitting in Century City, California, and I’m assuming you have a lot of clients. You built a book of business.
Tanya: Yes, yes. Over many years, yes.
Kevin: Well faster than you probably think.
Tanya: Yes. Actually, I mean in the grand scheme of things, I think it has been faster also because things move much more quickly these days than they used to. It’s still early I mean, I think your point earlier that it takes time, right? People can’t expect that these things are going to happen overnight but that’s what’s rewarding about it, is when they do happen. So I’ve had people that I’ve known in my legal world for 20 years who, maybe I knew them in some capacity when I was a mid-level associate somewhere, and now today, those people are my clients, and just coming to me because they think of me as a leading expert in privacy, and could I have ever seen that evolution happening? No, not at all. There’s just no way that that would-
Kevin: At the speed.
Tanya: The speed of- right, 10 to 15 years to go from nobody.
Kevin: Talk, yes, that’s why we talk- I talk to people, I said I haven’t joined the other State Trial Lawyers Association then nationally get on the board of these things and I still wasn’t there, and now people are doing it with publishing, and people might say, “Well, two years is a long time,” and I’m thinking, “That’s really relative.”
Tanya: Right. That’s very fast, yes.
Kevin: One question, we don’t have to connect it to everything else but if I don’t ask you the question my [unintelligible 00:21:45] will get upset, what was the problem that LexBlog solved for you as to why you have reached out and called me? [laughs] Because you could’ve done a blogger blog.
[laughter]
Tanya: Yes. Okay, so I was a very typical big firm lawyer in many ways, right, and it was like, “I wanna start a blog, I’m a lawyer, what do I do?” I probably google and remember- Actually, you know what, I probably had seen an article or something, because I think you are already getting press and “LexBlog” was getting a lot of press at the time, because it was catering to-
Kevin: Lawyers
Tanya: Lawyers and law firms and there were some big firms who are using you guys, so I think that’s where- because I knew that If I went to management and said, “Look, they are these other big firms who are using this as a platform,” right? It wasn’t just some random thing where I was going to spin up my own WordPress or something. That was why. It was designed, it was customized for lawyers and especially people who weren’t necessarily that savvy about how to do it.
Kevin: Yes, because when I started it, I think it was Rob Kahn and he was at Fenwick and may still be, invites me to speak at a conference, all these people are asking me questions about blogs and [unintelligible 00:22:55] announce me as the National Leader in Blog for Lawyers and I would type that blog, cost me four dollars for about 60 days. I thought it was all very funny, so then I go down to Tim Stanley’s place and Tim and his wife, Stacey had started fine law and I said, “Can you do blogs for lawyers because they’re free. I said, I’m a lawyer and I had a firm, I would be scared to death to do this, in fact, I’m really scared that they’re already finding my silly blog. It looks bad and I don’t know what to do.
[laughter]
Tanya: Right.
Kevin: Truth be told, that’s how the company started. I thought that lawyers are professionals, they didn’t want to look lame, they didn’t want to do anything stupid and they need to just relax about the process.
Tanya: Absolutely, no, I think you did, even if some of the things that were being done were relatively straight forward, having that as a platform to work off of, right, where you basically are logging in or you’re not even necessarily logging in. If you’re in a law firm and you’re a partner and you’re drafting something in word document and then either your assistant or an associate or somebody is going into this-
Kevin: Logs and publishes it.
Tanya: And it’s so user-friendly, etcetera, and it’s gotten obviously even more so over the years. It’s great, everyone here these days now, the lawyers themselves, they know exactly what to do, right? You don’t have to explain to them great detail.
Kevin: I was like, when word-processing came to me, I practiced law before there was Word Press.
Tanya: Right, no, now it’s very intuitive for them.
Kevin: Yes, I can tell somebody, “It’s just a Word Press Platform, oh that’s easy.”
Tanya: Exactly, yes.
Kevin: Well thank you very much, it is delightful.
Tanya: Yes, of course. Thank you, appreciate it.
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