The American Bar Association's Top 100 Blawgs and Why I Write

After getting some rather pleasant and surprising compliments about this site, I had a very pleasant e-mail from who runs the Massachusetts Divorce & Family Law Blog. He quite graciously mentioned me in a list of family law blogs. He has just started his blog. This blog has almost reached its first year. I was thinking about a response to e-mail about his start in blogging when I ran across two separate articles (Deliberations In The ABA Journal Blawg 100 and Who goes to the top? - you decide) about this ABA list. Both those lead to a third post, Law Blog vanity contests : ABA adds to the silliness. You can find the list by clicking here. No, you will not find this or any of my other blogs there. (By the way, blawg has been adopted by some lawyers for law-related blogs. I think it is lame and a difference without any important distinction.) My thoughts on these two subjects ran together into this post. Please excuse the introspection and the inside-baseball nature of what follows.

Generally, I agree with Kevin O'Keefe (which means I also means I am agreeing with Anne Reed of Deliberations and Nick Holmes of Binary Law) on the general point:

To select 100 chosen Whiz's of lawyer blogs confuses those who do not understand blogs. Last month I was doing a tele-seminar on law blogs hosted by the National Law Journal. Very worthwhile program. But the program host presumed that the 'good law law blogs' were limited to those 30 blogs in the Law.com Blog Network. When I mentioned that there were some wonderful blogs not included in the network, I was asked to 'name one.'

Although, I do like how Nick Holmes makes his related point:

Blogging, and Web 2.0 in general, is not about publisher A or B selecting and promoting what is best; it is about all the Xs and Ys contributing to the conversation in their field of interest and the Zs voting with their mice. The best will rise to the top and we don’t need anyone to select the short-list.

Many commenting on Kevin's blog are bloggers I read and have great respect for and certainly out of my league.

However, I got more annoyed when I look at the list and see that it is supposed to be about blogs for lawyers. Rush Nigut's comments on Kevin's blog match my reaction: these are not blogs I read for law. But I would except one category from that generality. That category being "The Lawyer's Toolkit." I think I have all but two bookmarked or on my RSS feed. Amongst the remaining categories there are several that I kept in reasonable contact with and some I read occasionally, but I found almost nothing where I expect something applicable to my practice. I doubt my opinion to be very far out of the mainstream. The comments on Kevin's blog make this same point over and over again. Finding so little that does speak to me as a lawyer grieves me especially as I know that there are far more informative to me (and only one blog by Grant Griffiths?).

I wonder what lawyers knew to blogging will think. I put off starting a blog for years because I thought that Marcia Oddi at The Indiana Law Blog pretty much cornered the market in Indiana. Only after reading more blogs and being a member of the Solosez and (for a short time) the Solomarketing newsgroups did I take the plunge. Even with the compliments this blog has received recently, I question how well I do what I do. This blog straddles between being for lawyers and for non-lawyers. I think a good many lawyer blogs so the same and perhaps for the same reason I straddle this line. I cannot limit those reading this blog to just lawyers or to non-lawyers, so I take the opportunity to communicate with both.

I must admit to no small concern that I am only adding to what amounts to a tempest in a teapot. After all, we are talking about the Internet here. It may be that Kevin O'Keefe's article is but only the first reaction and we will soon see blog after blog with their own "Best of List." Ms. Reed provides something worth thinking about here:

...It's true that there are wonderful blogs that won't show up on any national "best" list, but at least in my own case, any map I could get was very helpful when I was first learning the territory. You find blogs you trust when they're cited in other blogs you trust, and you have to start somewhere. I've gotten a startling number of visitors today from the ABA Journal site, and I hope some of those visitors come to rely on other blogs they learn about here.

You can find most of the blogs that impress me in my links list on the right hand side of this screen.

It may be that other lawyers will read this blog and decide they can do a better job. I will warn them now that this blogging thing can approach a compulsion. I certainly did not think that I would find much of interest to write about as often as I do, but now I have the opposite problem - I am finding much to write about.

Coming back to the ABA list, I guess I dislike the idea that these blogs are the best for lawyers. Mr. O'Keefe makes the very good point about how the general public will take this list. We have a small difference in what we see to be worst about the list but I think we have some similar concerns about its influence on blogging. Blogs provide lawyers the best means ever to demystify the legal system for the general public. Looking at where my traffic comes from, I think the potential for blogging has not even begun to be realized by the general public and by only a few of our fellow attorneys. From what I see of how people use this blog, they do not understand how to use its internal resources. I doubt most understand that a blog is not static but dynamic and so they do not use the subscription service or the RSS feeds.

I know some of the user side problems I just describe will not end entirely. There will those who need or want only a specific answer to a specific question. We will see the educational benefits for non-lawyers (and for lawyers, too) when they become more knowledgeable about the workings of a blog. When the readership becomes sophisticated enough, then I do expect to see Mr. O'Keefe's description come to fruition:

Law blogs represent disintermediation of publishers and gatekeepers. No more are those in supposed power and control going to screen and serve up what they think is important. A lawyer in a town with a water tower, an old grain elevator and 3 four way stops is on equal footing with a lawyer who clerked for a Supreme Court Judge. The democratization of publishing and dialogue we get through law blogs is at the very heart of what we stand for in America.