Mark Herrmann, whose The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law is one of my favorites and a necessary read for anyone interested in practicing in a law firm, has written a keen for his misadventure in blogging in the ABA’s Litigation Journal, Memoirs of a Blogger (.pdf). At the time, Herrmann was still writing for the Drug and Device Law Blog. Since submitting the article Herrmann left Jones Day to go in-house at Aon Corp. and retired from the blogosphere.

As usual, it’s well-written and incisive – a good primer for anyone considering starting a blog, to know what they’re getting into.

Good blogging is hard work

If you’re thinking of launching a legal blog, have your eyes open. Once you launch a blog, you will face the relentless, mind-numbing, never-ending task of finding worthwhile material to publish. That burden begins on the day of your first post and ends only the day you call it quits.

You want people to make your blog part of their daily routine: Turn on lights. Start computer. Grab coffee. Check headlines and professional news on the Web, in part by visiting the Drug and Device Law Blog. Ultimately, you want folks to subscribe to your blog so they receive notice of your posts as you publish them. To make that happen, you must regularly have new material on the blog that merits taking a look.

You can take a day off from publishing a post. But you’ll see the traffic to your site decrease. You can take a week off. But you’ll probably lose many readers permanently. You can take a month off. But when you start up again, you’ll essentially be building a new readership from scratch. Whether you are in depositions, in trial, or on vacation, you’d better pre-write some posts and have them published in your absence, or you’ll pay a price in readership.

Don’t have the blind spot that I did. Go into blogging aware of the Herculean effort it demands.

I would advise someone considering a legal blog to do it for a few weeks on a smaller scale, without any fanfare. Ideally, one might guest-blog on another blog in your area of interest. If not just create a disposable blogger account and try it out. Add up the hours you spend during your experimental blogging phase and then compare it to what you would have spent those hours on. It may depend on whether or not you’re displacing low value time in front of the television (as I often am) or time you would otherwise be working (and billing).

You may find, believe it or not, some intrinsic value in blogging. It’s nice when people comment or mention something about the blog to me in person, but I don’t write to start conversations and try to avoid controversy when I can see it coming. I would probably build it even if no one came. At the same time, I have no problem abandoning the blog for weeks at a time when more important matters take over my life.

Good blogging makes for good reading

Blogging also imposes a rigor on—or perhaps “clenches a death grip to”—your professional reading. No longer can you scan the headlines of the topical reporters to keep gently abreast of your field of law. Instead, the relentless need to generate fresh content will force you to analyze opinions start to finish in the hope of finding a publishable thesis. The need to feed the beast compels you to become a better student of the law.

I thought this was a particularly good observation and the principal reason why law students should consider blogging, perhaps treading lightly on areas where you realize there are others with greater knowledge and experience. For law students, the act of blogging forces a transformation from observer to participant, which we’ll soon be.

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