In a recent post, David Maister asked for comments on the extent to which Web 2.0 technologies were still considered "pioneering territory" for law firms.
As always, he got some interesting responses, not least the one from Struan Robertson, the editor of Out-law.com - the Pinsent Masons blog which does a fantastic job of capturing all the legal news affecting the web, particularly in the UK and Europe. In fact, if you were a firm like LloydLaw, you could very easily just feed their stuff onto your home page and have done with it.
He makes a number of very important points and the whole comment is worth reading. In particular he suggests:
Blogging can work well for a small firm; but the larger the firm, the harder if it is to blog effectively....a good blog is opinionated, pithy, edgy and spontaneous; but that's hard for a large firm to do: An argument that appeals to one client could upset another. It can be done, but it's tough.
This is critical stuff, because edginess and spontaneity are almost the antithesis of the way in which most lawyers approach their work. Certainly, they are mostly opinionated, but at the same time, they are more acutely aware than anyone how anything they might say could come back to haunt them. It's not just the issue of future employers, but clients, other solicitors and barristers. I could even see situations where you might find yourself undermining your own arguments if you try and argue something at some future date, which contradicts something you have written. The risk is that you won't be able to change your mind, or your arguments.
I actually disagree with Struan to some extent because even the smallest of law firms - and we are a two partner firm - can find itself with clients that will have conflicting interests and views. Not that such conflicts should be a barrier to openness and clear thinking.
Struan sets the standard:
On the web I think the most important thing is to give clients what they want. That's useful information written in plain English.
Knowing what clients want is one thing, but providing that information regularly without reverting to easy content is actually quite challenging - which is why I think there are so few legal blogs in the UK providing quality content to clients. When we set this one up, there was an element of the "shiny and new" about it, along with a realisation that it would be impossible to understand how to present a legal blog, without giving it a try.
I don't think it is has been particularly successful, although I am not sure what the definition of "success is". What I have learnt though, is that a "business" blog is much harder to sustain than a personal one. Because when you do your own personal blog (as I have), you are really doing it for yourself. Trying to anticipate what clients might want, is something entirely different.
So this is the challenge. Either we do it properly aiming for the "opinionated, pithy, edgy" standard, giving clients what they want. Or we don't do it at all. The pioneering days of Web 2.0 may be long gone, leaving in their wake the relics of abandoned blogs and wikis. But if you get it right and provide the sort of information that people are looking for, I'm pretty sure there's still plenty of gold to be found.
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