Karen Rubin is a primary author on the blog she co-founded, The Law for Lawyers Today. With expertise in legal ethics at Thompson Hine, she took her knowledge over to another sector: blogging. Bob Ambrogi asks her all about blogging for lawyers, what motivated her to get started, and some of the benefits lawyers who blog can reap.
Episode Summary:
During her conversation with Bob, Karen discusses what her blog is about and what motivated her to start writing for it in the first place. She emphasizes that it’s never too late to join the blogging community because you are always able to bring something unique to whichever conversation you choose to be a part of. By working through LexBlog and writing consistently, she was able to really make the most of the blogging process. She also discusses who her target audience was when she began writing for the blog, and how she was able to reach them and further build her readership. Karen and Bob discuss some of the unexpected benefits of blogging, such as increased business and press, which Karen notes weren’t her initial goals going into the blogging world but have certainly made the experience all the better. She ends the conversation by emphatically encouraging listeners to give blogging a try.
Here’s the full episode and, down below, we have a selection of the best exchanges.
Your blog is the Law for Lawyers today and it started in 2014. It’s about to be your anniversary this month so that’s fun. What’s the focus of your blog? Describe what kind of stuff you’re covering there.
We talk about legal ethics and professional responsibility, everything that touches on the law for lawyers, the law of lawyering. We have a national scope so we often talk about legal ethics rules that might apply across jurisdictions and we try to be very timely. Things that are of particular interest, sometimes they’re cautionary tales, sometimes they’re “don’t let this happen to you” and that seizes everybody’s interest in the law world. But other times they’re more thought pieces and things that have less “don’t let this happen to you,” and more “have you thought about this?” and “do this.”
How did you get started, what motivated you to start a blog in the first place?
Well Thompson Hine has about 350ish lawyers, give or take, and we’re spread out in eight different locations. So my colleagues in our Office of General Counsel, now our co-editors, started thinking about the fact that we have a lot of expertise in this area that we could share, that we could put out there for the benefit of other lawyers. So we started thinking in those terms in about 2013… At that point I kind of felt that we might have been a little bit late to the blog party by 2014. A lot of other law firms had not only single blogs, but multiple blogs, including firms that were in our marketplace. We thought we wanted to get something off the ground that would be beneficial and would spotlight our abilities and our expertise in this niche area. So we became a LexBlog blog in 2014 and for a while we were the only Thompson Hine blog. We started plugging away with weekly blogs, we took it very seriously and cranked out content every week, which I think is very important, to have regular communication, regular posts, regular content.
But you didn’t let that stop you, you went forward, so what did you find? Did you find in fact you were too late to the blogging game or did you find that really didn’t matter?
It didn’t matter at all, because as Colin and others at LexBlog always say, what you’re bringing to the party is unique. Whether the party has started or not, you haven’t been there and your voice and your passion and your expertise and your angle on things is unique and that’s really what you bring to the party. So in that sense it’s never too late to join in because you’re going to find readers who want your content because it speaks in your own voice.
It sounds like when you started out your primary intended audience was the lawyers in your firm. In the beginning, how did you develop a readership either among the lawyers in your firm or how did you start to build it out to an audience beyond your firm?
We actually always had a vision of the blog as outward facing. We had the idea that the Law for Lawyers Today was definitely going to be a resource for our own lawyers. We knew that there would be an audience externally also and from the very beginning we were facing out as well as in. So we suspected, and it’s turned out to be true, that there are a lot of in house counsel out there who would find what we have to say very useful because they don’t have an Office of General Counsel, they don’t have ethics counsel sitting in their corner suite or maybe anywhere else either and so in some important senses we knew we might have an opportunity to become very useful to those kinds of consumers, readers, to that audience and that has turned out to be very true.
I don’t know if the press reaches out to you but those are all some of the side benefits I’ve seen dramatically over the years from blogging….but I’m sure that happens with you as well.
It has, I was excited to get a call from Wisconsin Public Radio two weeks ago. They had an interesting case come down and the reporter had a legal ethics issue about judges and whether they could be Facebook friends with litigants, parties in front of them in other words. I had blogged about that a couple of years ago and the reporter found it and I had an opportunity to be part of an NPR piece because of a blog post I wrote. Stuff like that is just so fun and it’s so validating also, it really makes you feel that you are providing a service. You are providing important information for people to use. That was very gratifying and things like that happen on a regular basis so it’s a nice thing.
Any closing words of advice for other lawyers who are thinking about blogging? What would you say?
Take the plunge. If you’re thinking about blogging and you like to write and you have a niche, don’t hold back. Take the plunge, it’s really really fun and it can bring you lots of benefits. If you have a blog and you feel stalled, take a fresh look at it and think about what to do to freshen it up and make a pledge to yourself to put more routine in it and see where it takes you. I think it will take you in a good place.
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