Craig Williams Shares His Thoughts on Weblogs
J. Craig Williams doesn’t just attract clients with his weblog May It Please the Court (see below), he scores points with webgrumps like myself with his prompt and insightful replies. Less than two hours after I wrote to Craig, asking for his views on weblogs as marketing tools, he gave us a gem. Since the New York Times made Craig a weblawging idol today, I’m especially grateful that he would so quickly find the time to respond to a stranger’s plea.
After over a week debating these issues and collecting opinions, I believe Craig’s thoughts are too valuable to hide inside our Comment box, so I’m presenting them in full on the front page. Despite the opening line — “David, you’re right” has a nice ring to it! — I think Craig has a lot to say that will encouarge Kevin O’Keefe at lexBlog.
David, You’re right. I spend about an hour or more a day (in my business that’s over $10K a month in invested time), and my blog is stamped with my personality and quirkiness. I think that would be hard to achieve in a packaged blog - at least I hope so if other lawyers ar going to be competing with my blog.
We also host another blog - posted to monthly - A Criminal Waste of Space. That’s written by a local appellate court justice.
May It Please the Court has driven both small and large clients to our firm. We get emails and calls about the items that are posted on it - most of which relate in one way or another to our practice. Of course there are the occasional posts that are about topics I can’t resist, and that’s where you begin to see the full range of my personality.
Sure, Kevin’s got a great product, and I expect that it will sell, and hopefully he’ll make money. But, the lawyers’ personality won’t show through. Let me put in a self-serving quote from Amy Langfield’s New York Notebook on Business Blogging Models:
“This, I think, is a case where businesses who know nothing about blogs should pay attention. What his law blog is doing - I suspect - is showing a potential client exactly where he is coming from. You get a mix of his personality and his expertise before you even pick up the phone to talk to him. Possibly most importantly, he starts to develop trust. Brilliant.”
OK, very self serving. But, the point she’s making is where I’m driving. Most people hire lawyers based on recommendations from others. A blog allows my potential clients to get to know me first, and develop their own relationship.
That’s what drives marketing. It’s how others view you. s/Craig Williams
As if the above contribution weren’t enough, Craig supplemented it with the following email message at 9:43 P.M. As you can see, you can’t just launch a weblog and start counting the cash (emphases added):
To; David Giacalone
From: J. Craig Williams
My weblog, May It Please The Court, is a part of an overall marketing strategy for my law firm: we use it in email responses, it is on our letterhead and announcements, in our brochure, and even has its own business card. I speak about it regularly at continuing legal education seminars for lawyers, and to others who are developing marketing projects.
We send out email “pushes” once a month with the last 20 postings so readers can go right to the article of their choice. I think, actually, that’s where most of my direct responses come from. Sure, I may already have a relationship with those people, but it’s the blog that triggers them to call me. It’s also a reminder.
But, the success of it (I think what drives clients) is that it is, at the same time, none of those things.
It has it’s own life. I love to write (I teach legal writing at Chapman University School of Law), and I love to publish. Blogging allows me to do that without an editor. It’s really me, and it’s not packaged. I think Kevin’s prepackaged blog is no different than the prepackaged newsletters you get from lawyers, doctors and dentists. For those people, they’re trying to develop brand recognition. They want to get their name in front of you. Kevin’s product will do that.
Will it [Kevin’s product] result in business? Compared to legal bloggers who write their own content, I’m not quite so sure. I think you have to put yourself out there, who you truly are, and let people see that. You show them that you’re the one they want to hire because you either write well, they understand what you write, or you’re writing about the very thing that they need help with (admittedly, the last is very rare). But, it’s you. It’s not an editor that gets hired.
Just as important to getting clients, however, is that the blog teaches me. In order to write it, I read slip opinions, cases from other jurisdictions, other blogs and lots of legal news each day. I am consequently more informed about the law than if I did not write it. As an example, I got an email from an environmental consultant this morning (April 19, 2004) about a decision from the Ninth Circuit on the attorney-client privilege and attorney work-product doctrine. It was a new decision to him. I had a target written about the case back on December 11, 2003. He was impressed that I already knew about the case, and I was able to point him to my blog entry for more information about it. Lawyers who use prepackaged blogs will not have that benefit.
s/Craig
Here are additional thoughts from Amy’s New York Notebook (thanks for the pointer, Craig):
I think Channel 9 and May it Please the Court are two strong examples of how businesses will start using blogging successfully. And if you think about how much distrust is still in the air from the stench of Enron, Worldcom, Shell, the mutual fund industry scandal, the accounting industry scandals, etc. and so on, you figure people are hungry to find someone they can trust and blogs could go a long way to providing more transparency for honest businesses.
For a change, I’ll refrain from offering my inflated two cents. . .
Update (04-22-04): 
I’m pleased to report that Kevin O’Keefe has re-written the lexBlog premium services page, removing a quotation from author Rebecca Blood, which we have noted was taken out of context (leaving out the importance of hands-on weblogging for achieving expertise and authority status), and which seemed to suggest that Ms. Blood endorsed lexBlog’s services.
The Craig Williams Shares His Thoughts on Weblogs by David Giacalone, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.